Created : 2026-09-07
Last updated : 2026-09-12

Digital Gardening

Garden - what ?

I think we are all familiar with the concept of garden. The real life garden. A place where things grow (or die) at their own pace. A place that ressemble its owner : it can be perfectly organized, be functionnal, it can be messy, experimental, or it can be pretty, with no set purpose. A garden can be more or less tended, it can be communal, shared, or intimate.

Just like a real garden, a digital garden is a patch of the internet where thoughts are cultivated to flourish and change over time.

Other possibilities

They were (and are) loads of different ways to collect thoughts and writing pieces on the internet. There also loads of things I personally think about them. So lets make an incomplete recap !


Hypertext gardens | The late 90s ancester or the digital garden, the writing pieces are linked inside other ones. It plays with the disorientation and the concept of diggin into the website : you can miss some pieces, as they are often no explicit navigation.

Wikis | Wikis are more "online databases", often collaborative, where people submit pages to further explain concepts. I don't think I want to solely focus on knowledge and I wanted to try and make my tool personal with sprinkles of research.

Web diaries/journals | Just like personal journals on notebooks, they are collections of thoughts and answers to prompts in chronological order. They are less knowledge based but more focused on instinctual writing pieces and personal experiences.

Blogs | When diaries stray away from deeply personnal subjects, they often become blogs. I first got introduced to blogs with Canaille blog when I was a kid hehe. What I dislike about the blog system is the chronological order and the publish button. You need to have it done, a finished piece, and get it frozen in time.

Social media | When I was old enough to share on the internet, I felt like there was no other other choice than social media. It was accessible but busy, extremely ephemeral, really not customizable, catered towards shorter personal content, aiming at reactions from other people and owned by evil private companies. I'm not judging people who uses social media, I myself am still stuck in the algorithmic loop, but it's an objective of mine to slowly but surely get out of there.

Is a garden my solution ?

Now that I reviewed those options I think I have a better grasp on why I think a garden might be a good choice for my next trial:

And the best reason of all :

I can do whatever I want, it doesn't have consequences, it's just a playground.

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