#digitalgardens — Public Fediverse posts

Been rethinking how I read, not just what I read.

Started with a professor’s curated readings → https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/
Then stumbled into personal systems like https://malcolmocean.com/myhabits/

From there, it branches:

- What to read → https://agentyduck.blogspot.com/p/noticing.html
- How to interpret → The Great Gatsby essays (Atlantic / NYT revisiting it 100 years later)
- How to create → https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-make-a-book/
- And even: what blogging looks like in 10 years → https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2025/04/blogiversary-what-will-this-blog-look-like-in-10-years-part-10-of-10.htm

Pattern I’m seeing:
Reading isn’t consumption — it’s a system:
curation → interpretation → creation → reflection.

Most people stop at step one.

#reading #learning #writing #digitalgardens #selfeducation #systemsThinking

Pushback against digital gardens?

One of the most unexpected things I’ve seen is the pushback I’ve seen against digital gardens.

I wrote the blog post Digital gardens vs blogging: What’s the difference?. The intention was to demonstrate how these two ways of being on the Internet differ from each other.

My interpretation, by the way, is not something I came up with but is echoed by some digital garden practitioners such as Joel Hooks: Stop Giving af and Start Writing More.

I suspect part of the reason I resonated with his article (especially his resentment and irritation about what blogging has become), was because I was a blogger since the dawn of the Internet. I used to build my blog using raw HTML, back when blog wasn’t even called a blog.

Over the years, I’ve seen blogging morph from online diaries and eccentric websites sharing quirky things to well-polished, SEO-optimised articles promoting brands, businesses, a person’s skills and knowledge via templatised web structures.

Yes, granted that this is a generalisation of how people blog, but just search for the term “blog” or “blogging” and you’ll get recommendations on how to be a top blog on the search engines, SEO tactics, endless listicles and more.

Leaving aside those who refuse to comply to these demands*, blogging has been dominated by SEO and marketing forces for a long time.

(If you belong to this category, really, this article is not speaking about you (nor am I speaking about those who do), I’m not calling you inferior for writing content chronologically! I mean, see how dumb that sentence reads?)

Besides this article, I remember sharing Maggie Appleton’s digital garden illustration in The Dark Forest and Generative AI, and got a flurry of angry posts from it too.

People were fixated with her interpretation of the Dark Web. (I suppose describing it as a place of “decomposing morals” didn’t help. It’s nice to know that even the great Digital Gardner Maggie Appleton is not immune to pushback.)

I can’t help but chuckle about this as I feel what I’m seeing is the human instinct of being tribal and taking sides, happening here. We are all cave men in the end, driven by the instinct to protect our tribes.

I believe people can be very attached to their way of doing things, whether it be eating, living, commuting, blogging, you name it.

However, I’d like to emphasise that this post is not to attack the people giving me pushback about digital gardens. The ego may be somewhat dented (mostly because I’m annoyed that my writing wasn’t clear enough but caused misunderstanding), but this is valuable feedback. This is why I wrote the post!

The feedback made me wonder if there’s anyway to unruffle feathers and re-clarify the concept of digital gardens so that people may be less adversarial towards it.

It’s not an us vs them issue, truly

I was perhaps too quick to say that blogging is a promotional activity, though if you’ve worked in media for as long as I have (literally from the dawn of the Internet age), it sure seems like it, especially with the emphasis of using the medium to “build your brand”. Yes, I admit that I hate what blogging has become, saying:

Marketing has assimilated blogging and I hate it.

I didn’t think of adding a disclaimer to my article saying that “this is my opinion, and this doesn’t apply to all blogs” was kinda understood, but next time I’ll be sure to add it for clarity!

I concede that my article’s title, “Digital Gardens vs Blogging”, didn’t help matters, but seriously, I had zero intentions to pit blogging and digital gardening against each other.

For one, I am still blogging side by side with my digital garden! The category, Journal, is literally my blog, which I still blog about my life, chronologically. And occasionally, I commit the sin of building my personal brand with it!

My website is actually a hybrid – a digital garden and a blog.

And that’s the best thing about digital gardening is that your website can look however you want.

It’s not about which one is better

At the end of the day the difference between bloggers and digital gardeners is not whether one is better than the other, but in the way they organise and write their content.

That’s it.

Let me repeat for clarity:

From what I understand from reading the many, many articles about digital gardens, the difference between blogging and digital gardening lies in the way content is:

• organised. Blogs = chronological, digital gardens = not chronological
• written. Blogs = usually polished and SEO optimised, so that it can be promoted via social media channels. Digital gardens = unfinished copy. The gardener may return to the post/page to update it with more information later.
• niched. Not necessarily true for all blogs, of course, but it is “common wisdom” that if you want to get more eyeballs, niching is the way to go for blogs. Digital gardeners usually do not write about one topic nor do they angst about niching. Usually.
• fleeting or evergreen. Blogs, due to their chronological structure is fleeting. Old posts are often buried. Digital gardens are structured in such a way that each post can be evergreen, resurfaced again and again. Often, digital gardens are organised by categories where people can “fall into rabbit holes” where one post can lead to links to many other posts.

I think part of the problem is that there’s a lot of mystery around the term “digital gardens”. At least for now. So, it’s being promoted as some revolutionary, new-fangled thing.

Honestly, it isn’t that mysterious or even new. One way to think about digital gardens is that it is simply an individual’s curated wiki on the Internet, a knowledge base.

Both digital gardens and blogging have the same objective, sharing knowledge.

So, in conclusion:

Digital gardening is just a different way to present your thoughts on the Internet.

You can blog and digital garden at the same time and in the same space like I do.

Digital gardens give you the freedom to break free of preconceived notions or “best practices” on how to write on the Internet.

Digital gardens can be freeing. For one, it was one of the main reasons why I am writing more on my website now. Because I realise I don’t have to dance to the algorithm anymore just to be read.

I write in my digital garden because I want to learn in public.

I write in my digital garden because I want to clarify my ideas and what I’ve learned. By writing and teaching others about my ideas and learnings, I get to solidify what I’ve learned in my brain.

The feedback I get, even negative ones, help me reshape my ideas.

In the end, I write in my digital garden because it makes me happy.

#BeingAWriter #blog #blogging #digitalgardens #indieweb #Internet

For citizens of the #OpenWeb, I think it means deciding what we love about it and then fighting for those things.

For me, it's the quirky platforms that comprise the #OpenWeb — #Omglol #Feedland, #microblog, and many others. It's also all the personal sites, blogs and #digitalgardens, on the #indieweb.