I gave out an assignment in a course that I teach. It is called artistic realization in digital environments. My students were tasked with finding digital role models — but not focusing on the content, but on how they do it. How they present things. The framework for communication.
A student whose primary interest was in writing shared a page and said: “Maggie Appleton’s, whose art/interests I’m not particularly interested in, but the website itself is roughly what I want to achieve.” The site the student shared was https://maggieappleton.com/. I immediately realized that this was something out of the ordinary. For example, every time a student submitted something, I did a little extra research to see what framework the person had used — WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, or whatever the hell they use. And all examples except Maggie’s page were made using commercial frameworks. Her page was where someone had sat down and thought “how do I want it?” — ignored templates, and just went for it. Built based on their own needs, based on “this is how I would like it to be”.
And that made me realize: how much we are stuck in other people’s business models. We are stuck because they have convinced us that this is the only way to do it — that it’s so much simpler. And I believe that is demonstrably not true, especially not now with the help of AI.
I read further on Maggie’s page. I read her article about digital gardens. I almost got angry, but mostly at myself — how the hell did I miss this? How has this passed me by? Why was I not invited to this party?
It pinpointed exactly what I’ve felt has been missing in web contexts right now. I feel, like many, that my trust in social media has been completely lost. Social media is about selling your content to someone else and being entirely at the mercy of someone else’s business model. Where you have zero control or zero opportunities to do anything unless you are incredibly compliant and constantly trying to hack the algorithm to go viral.
I don’t need my posts to go viral. Perhaps that my content reaches the right people. And perhaps I’m not in a hurry either.
But also: the advice if you’re going to start a channel on some social media, where you’re supposed to start cranking up the megaphone and talking out to the masses — advice number one is always to find a concept. Only talk about one thing. You can’t talk about complex systems, politics, and disc golf or role-playing games. It’s not possible. You have to choose, you have to be specialized. And I am broad and want to talk about everything. I’ve always felt: “damn, do you have to do that? What a shame.” Because with my ADHD brain, everything is connected. It’s part of the same cloud of concepts that are always related to each other.
I have been using Obsidian for many, many years now. And just that — writing in Obsidian, in that format — makes my brain just go “mm, lovely”. It unleashed a lot of creativity in me, an incredible amount of immediate and easily accessible creativity, by moving away from a linear format.
In short, the conclusion – digital gardening is made for me.
Then I don’t know if it will just become another graveyard on the internet where letters and words wither away and eventually end up in the Wayback Machine. Time will tell.