Digital Gardens

A digital garden is a personal site of linked, evolving notes rather than a dated stream of posts. Maggie Appleton’s history of the form lists six shared design patterns, beginning with “topography over timelines” (notes organized by contextual relationships and associative links), “continuous growth” (never finished, always open to revision) and imperfection and learning in public.

Related threads:

• @holden writes that his 2014/15 essays, including “The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral,” inspired the digital gardens movement and the creators of Roam and Notion, and that the web as topology versus web as events distinction is now mainstream.
• Rob Haisfield wanted Roam Research to serve as a digital garden but found it not built for it, and pointed to a TiddlyWiki-based alternative.
• A recommendation of “Why Bother?” pitches it for anyone starting a blog, YouTube channel or digital garden to learn in public (Learn in Public).
• The Readwise reading-app post warns that when saves outrun reading, “your digital garden” becomes “a digital graveyard.”

Where this appears

Tweets

• I’ve Been Tended a Long… (tweet)
• So I Am Going to… (tweet)
• I really wanted @RoamResearch to… (tweet)
• Just Read Why Bother by… (tweet)

Long reads

• The Next Chapter of Readwise — Our Own Reading App