📚 node [[digital garden]]
  • a [[thing]].
    • [[key]]
    • A digital garden is a loose collection of hyperlinked notes (personal, or project scoped) that are maintained over long periods of time; like if you were tending to a garden over the years.
    • Digital gardens benefit from [[compounding effect]]s: they gain usefulness over time.
      • Hypothesis: their usefulness goes up superlinearly w.r.t. nodes added, as a lot of the value is in the networking: the relations between concepts, events, pieces of information that build up over time.
    • [[go]] https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
    • #pull [[digital gardeners]] [[joel hooks]] [[maggie appleton]] [[friends]] [[agora]]
  • Seeds. Seed your garden with quality content and cultivate your curiosity. Plant seeds in your mind garden by taking smart personal notes (taking raw notes is useless). These don't need to be written in a publishable form.
  • Trees. Grow your knowledge by forming new branches and connecting the dots. Write short structured notes articulating specific ideas and publish them in your digital garden. One note in your digital garden = one idea. (what you're currently reading is such a note) Do not keep orphan notes. Thread your thoughts.
  • Fruits. Produce new work. These are more substantial—essays, videos, maybe a book at some point. The kind of work researchers and creatives may hope will help them live beyond their expiration date.

[[Maggie Appleton Garden]]

Digital garden

Recently-ish popular term for a kind of public personal PKM / wiki. [[A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden]] is a great read to learn more about digital gardens.

Also see [[the Garden]] metaphor for some history.

What

an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public.

How to set up your own digital garden - Ness Labs

  • a concept that describes the practice of maintaining and growing a collection of digital content, such as notes, ideas, and thoughts, in an organic and unstructured way.
  • often used as a creative tool for exploring, sharing, and developing ideas, and can be viewed as a more flexible and fluid alternative to traditional personal blogs or portfolios.
  • a way to document learning and growth over time, and a way to share thoughts and experiences with others.

You mean a wiki, right?

I think "wiki" is a term that focuses on a particular tool, whereas "digital garden" is a more user-intention high level phrase

https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2021-11-26#t1637964070215800

You mean blogging, right?

Sounds a bit like blogging, no?

I prefer to think of digital gardening as a new variation of blogging. Blogging that is:

  • Constantly evolving
  • Less performative
  • Community-focused

🪴 Planting Your Digital Garden

Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.

How to set up your own digital garden - Ness Labs

You mean personal websites, right?

I tend to think of it more as that intersection of notebook/blog/wiki, but it is sometimes also framed as 'old school [[personal website]]'.

A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. – Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Why

“With [[blogging]], you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

“Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. “The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.”

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

Why not

Should you really publish your half-baked notes-to-self to the Internet?

To me that is unthinkable: my notes are an extension of my thinking and a personal tool. They are part of my inner space. Publishing is a very different thing, meant for a different audience (you, not me), more product than internal process. At most I can imagine having separate public versions of internal notes, but really anything I publish in a public digital garden is an output of my internal digital garden.

100 Days in Obsidian Pt 6: Final Observations – Interdependent Thoughts

To be honest, I don’t see much appeal in publishing your entire unfiltered notes to the web. Synthesize interesting portions of them occasionally into coherent blog posts that other people can consume without digging through a forest of links, backlinks, and footnotes.

hpfr

You're probably already doing it

Believe it or not, you've probably already started planting the seeds of your digital garden. You don't necessarily need an organized wiki on your self-hosted personal site. Posting on social media is still the most common form of digital gardening.

🪴 Planting Your Digital Garden

Agree with that wholeheartedly. Although the [[indiewebber]] in me says that if you're doing it on a big social media platform, it won't work out in the long run.

Misc

  • The garden is more about the [[use-value]] of information, the stream more about [[exchange-value]] of information.

Twin Pages

    Couldn't parse #push. See source for content.
⥅ node [[agora]] pulled by user

Welcome to [[boris mann]]'s section of the agora!

We're experimenting with [[Connecting to the Agora]], and what some of the configurations and conventions are. The [[Anagora]] page has my notes and feature requests.

Status

  • This document was mostly written in 2018. The Agora was then just a thought experiment. It has since grown to be a living project.
  • As late as 2020-10-17, the Agora barely existed as a concrete implementation -- it was not a single tool but rather many which you could use in tandem following a convention, which I provisionally named Agora Protocol.
  • As of 2022-01-02, a reference Agora is online on https://anagora.org . Using terminology gained and derived in the last three years (with the help of the Agora community!), I can now describe it as a [[knowledge commons]].

Regardless of implementation details, an Agora can be assembled out of off-the-shelf parts available on the internet, mostly for free:

  • Knowledge management tools used for the purpose of building a distributed knowledge graph, following the aforementioned convention based on lazily evaluated [[wikilinks]]. See https://anagora.org/agora-editor for a review of some of the tools in this space, or Roam Likes for an older take.
  • Social networks and the constructive bits of the internet as we have them, annotated and enriched using open tools and standards.
  • An explicit constructive social contract. For reference you can consult the anagora.org default.

If you are interested in collaborating on building Agoras or similar constructive spaces, please reach out or peruse the Git repository.

See also: https://flancia.org/go/agora-howto , https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1322619094563258370.html.

Head

You can think of the Agora as a convention based social network; an optional, user-controlled annotation layer that can be applied over any internet platform which supports user-generated content.

I think one of the best possible uses for such a network would be to use it to pro-socially maintain a distributed knowledge graph tailored specifically to the goal of solving problems: those of its users and society at large.

Its users, as a cooperative group, could by default take a naive but rational approach to problem solving:

  • For each problem in the set P of all problems:
    • Describe it as thoroughly as possible.
    • Maintain a set of known or argued possible solutions, S(P).
  • For each solution in S(P):
    • Describe it as thoroughly as possible.
    • Maintain a set of resources (people, time, attention, money) needed to implement it, R(S).

Individual users could also declare their views on the state of the world explicitly: they define which subsets of P, S and R they agree with, in the sense that they believe they are feasible, true, interesting.

Users that agree on their defined subsets can then efficiently collaborate on solutions as they become available by pooling of resources.

We apply some good old recursivity and seed the Agora with the problem of how to build itself. That is, how to build a system that allows participating users and entities to collaborate optimally in the face of adversity (such as biases, irrationality and even actual ill intent)1.

The Agora should be built on a federated protocol to limit the harmfulness of diasporas. Groups might temporarily diverge in their views enough to want to run separate Agoras, but different Agoras should be able to cooperate on problems and solutions for which there is enough ideological alignment, and eventually merge.

Tail

I have a more focused and detailed unpublished document which will probably replace or complement this chapter soon.

I know the premise sounds almost like a joke: what the world needs is a new social network. The internet and social networks are technologies we are just barely learning to live with, and the recent cause of a lot of polarization and political escalation and Trump Being President2. It doesn't sound at first like we should add another stick to that particular dumpster fire. But hear me out.

We need a designated place in the internet where we can discuss ideas in a constructive way. In particular, where we can discuss possible strategies to face the problems that humanity is facing. This is already happening, for sure; but is it happening somewhere on the internet where everybody can contribute? I don't think so. If the Agora exists already, please point the way -- I'd like to get there, and building it from scratch would be hard. The network of universities and institutes are the closest we have and I love them, but the Agora should be fully open and available to all over the internet, so every participating individual can contribute work and thought. Of course the whole internet could be an Agora; but the internet as a whole is chaotic and disorganized and thus its implicit Agora is entangled with places that are not constructive and not safe. There must be a better way.

Nick Bostrom has a paper on existential risk where he talks about a kind of lottery of ideas; humanity is constantly playing this game, the metaphor goes, and drawing ideas out of big lottery wheels of Science and Technology and Culture. Some of the balls in this wheel are colored white; these are good ideas. They contribute to human good, and we're glad we found them.

There are also black balls, though. These are bad3. They are things that, on the whole, produce enough bad to be existential risks to humanity. Nuclear power seemed to be this for a while; perhaps mutually assured destruction could have resulted in an apocalypse. But it didn't! Aren't we lucky? If (and it's a big if) things stay this way, we got away with playing with something dangerous. Perhaps we can use the idea for whatever good it holds (cheap and relatively safe energy), or perhaps we decide to bury it underground in a big vault of ideas (this one doesn't have to ever spin again) that says Do Not Go There, Trust Us. For now, though, the idea might still turn out to be black; we could, perhaps, represent this situation as a grey ball of whatever shade we deem most likely.

We need a social network for discussing ideas. For talking about Bostrom's lottery urn, and what it has in it for us. In the Agora, we discuss ideas and their shades and merit; we discuss, first and foremost, ethics. We talk openly and clearly about how to best move forward as a society of humans, with the knowledge we've gotten and the resources we have.

What if social networks are grey? How dark is their shade? The high modernist in me wants to believe that the structured flow of information is more of a good thing than a bad thing. But we need to be cautious, and this is why I wrote this and you are reading it now.

I need your help.

In Flancia there is no poverty.

  1. To start with, discussion in the Agora should follow the tried and tested Principle of Charity.

  2. what if Twitter is already a decent Agora, and Trump just woke up to the fact that it's a superior meme transfer device sooner than others?

  3. White = good and black = bad is in the original paper. Now, an apology: I don't like the fact that our culture encodes bad things as black, it's associated with death, etc. I think associating black with badness is a bit trite in a world that puts so much stock on being a particular kind of yellow.

Agora

An agora, in its broadest sense, is a conceptual space where people attempt to bring an increased level of intentionality, explicitness, and mutual agreement to the principles and protocols for interacting in that space. A further aspect of the idea of an Agora is that it is a space which enables collaboration. In particular, it is a space that allows for collaboration guided by specific shared interests, without requiring the co-consitutients of the agora to be aligned more fully or generally in terms of their intentions, values, etc.

Some topics that the idea of an Agora is related to: [[transparency]] [[decentralized structures]] [[egalitarian principles]] [[judgement]] [[algorithms of interaction]] [[communication]] [[collaboration]] [[knowledge sharing]]

There are (infinitely) many possible variants of how this idea might be implemented in concrete, real-world situations. For example, an agora could be a space that is opened up inside a conversation between two people. Or it could be a collaborative project that is accompanied by specified rules. Or it could be a collective agreement about how to handle certain types of situations.

One variant of the idea of an Agora is a place where personal notes are shared, with the common goal of pooling information and sharing knowledge. One implementation of this idea is https://anagora.org . See also https://flancia.org/go/agora .

The term "Agora" and the basic idea come from [[Flancia]].

img side { lapin 77 {My visual take}}

Agora is a ‘wiki like experimental social network and distributed knowledge graph’, so they said. I would say it's an aggregator of digital gardens and a community around it. Anagora is the first and biggest instance of it. [[Flancian]] was the one who created it and the software behind, but there were other good contributors. Thank you!

=> https://anagora.org

I'm part of it:. I also frequent the associated video conferences.

=> https://anagora.org/@melanocarpa | Melanocarpa in Agora => https://anagora.org/@bouncepaw-betula | My recent bookmarks in Agora

Agora makes a big emphasis on graphs and links. Their analogue of hyphae is called a node, nodes are generated from contents from multiple sites. There is also a cool notion of push/pull and go links!

//I was inspired by Agora's go links and implemented something very similar in [[Betula]].//

2022-01-18 I wrote the author an email about the possibilities of making Agora and [[Mycorrhiza]] compatible. 2022-03-06 Melanocarpa was added to Anagora, along with Mycorrhiza support. Furthermore, in 2023 proper support of [[Mycomarkup]] was added.

=> https://github.com/flancian/agora-server/commit/7783430aa33986186e9fd66ee858250b115e0d7e | Commit that adds Mycorrhiza support.

The Agorans also seem to be using [[git]]-based [[markdown]]-driven digital gardens mostly. It is the default choice for many, but luckily support for more formats was added. Mycorrhiza, for example, is supported! There is also [[Betula in Agora]].

= See also => Wiki => Social network => Digital garden => https://mycorrhiza.wiki/help/en/hypha => https://anagora.org/node => https://anagora.org/go => Flancia

You can't really talk about Agora without Flancia.

Agora

This looks like a really cool way of aggregating digital gardens into one place. To produce a community garden (or, an agora). Interesting to contrast with how a solely P2P way of connecting gardens might work, no central aggregator.

An Agora is a distributed, goal-oriented social network centered around a cooperatively built and maintained [[knowledge graph]]. The implementation you are currently looking at tries to assemble such a graph out of a collection of digital gardens.

GitHub - flancian/agora

See also [[sister sites]].

See: [[What do I think about the Agora?]]

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⥅ node [[digital-gardeners]] pulled by user

Digital Gardeners

⥅ node [[friends]] pulled by user
⥅ node [[joel-hooks]] pulled by user
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⥅ node [[maggie-appleton]] pulled by user

#go-link https://maggieappleton.com/

[[digital-garden]] [[Maggie Appleton Garden]]

Helps explain technology, anthropology, and programming through illustration.

[[person]]

⥅ node [[digital_garden]] pulled by Agora

Digital garden is a metaphor and a practice for a digital resource such as a website, usually managed (“grown”) by one person. Its content is usually placed not chronologically, but in a different way. Incompleteness of content units such as articles is pretty common. An unfinished article is a sapling, and the webmaster is a gardener.

A digital garden is a sort of a personal website.

See [[цифровой сад]] for more information in Russian.

Some gardens and personal [[wiki]]s:

=> http://webseitz.fluxent.com => https://pbat.ch/wiki => https://gavart.ist => https://nchrs.xyz => http://anish.lakhwara.com => https://sona.kytta.dev => https://chotrin.org => https://www.paritybit.ca/garden => https://smallandnearlysilent.com => https://caffeine.wiki

See the rest of personal sites, some of them being digital gardens, at [[links>/tag/personal_site]].

[[Agora]] aggregates digital gardens.

= What to keep? [[2022-07-22]] Maybe I should delete everything related to things I dislike from my digital garden? Make it a bouncespace with smiles and joy

@neauoire@merveilles.town

I don't think you should delete things that you once liked, and no longer do, I think you should just write that you're ideas about this thing changed instead.

= Abyss J3s has an interesting take: => https://abyss.j3s.sh/hypha/digital_abyss

to me, it feels wrong. i don't write for meticulous care & growth, i write because i'm desperate to (connect, understand, remember, leave something behind)

it reminds me that i'll die someday & i want people to remember who i was, and how i thought. i leave tracings of myself in this abyss, hoping that it'll help other people. it's fragments of me.

that's no garden. it's a mortal abyss. and i find a lot of meaning staring into it.

= Links => https://doubleloop.net/2021/05/16/heh-nice-the-digital-garden-metaphor/

Heh nice the digital garden metaphor makes an appearance in Free, Fair and Alive

<= Flux Garden

=> http://thoughtstorms.info/view/GardenImagologies

📖 stoas
⥱ context
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