Shockingly, they do! Quite a few folks that I've talked to recently expressed that they are subscribed to more than one email newsletter and read them fairly consistently.
Fair feedback. In my eyes, I treat any personal site as a digital garden - I am not really sticking to the "pure" definition. If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? I think it is, but that's my own take on it.
I intentionally try to avoid sites that are in any shape _not_ personal or otherwise representative of an individual trying to stake their little corner of the internet.
I dunno, sounds more like some gate keeping, or maybe I'm biased because I hate the term for no discernible reason.
> has content of different levels of development, is imperfect and often a playground for experimentation, learning, revising, iteration, and growth for diverse content
So because I polish my "posts" to a certain degree before publishing it's not a digital garden? Because 50% of my blog posts are "timeless" in a sense that they're about... stuff that exists.. not current dvelopments it's not a digital garden? Becuase I never delete stuff (as if people with wikis would delete stuff :P)... and so on.
I mean, I couldn't care less but I feel (and this seems to be a common theme) that the indieweb people are mostly dogmatic about their definitions and not very encouraging (also why I tried to take part in the irc channel years ago and left, frustrated).
But yeah, if someone want to own the definition of blog and digital garden and not accepting a certain overlap with "personal website", sure.
> I dunno, sounds more like some gate keeping, or maybe I'm biased because I hate the term for no discernible reason.
I'm not too fond of the term either, but I think that's because it got gentrified and somewhat misunderstood. Everything personal on the web was suddenly a garden.
> But yeah, if someone want to own the definition of blog and digital garden and not accepting a certain overlap with "personal website", sure.
Of course there's a overlap. My point was not that the listed sites had to fulfill the criteria for classification, but if there's not a single hint of gardening going on, then we might as well call en.wikipedia.org a blog?
Also, is a website "personal" if it's just there to market your services? Sure, it's personal as in your website, but content wise it's not particularly personal. Gardens or personal wikis are usually not there to market services, but to build some kind of personal knowledge base (that other nerds, not employers, might find interesting).
Point taken, maybe I got a little sidetracked with the direction of the discussion and not the original website and its content. FWIW, I think there are wikis that are non-personal (wikipedia, tech, etc) and there can be websites by individuals that are just "marketing" in the wider sense, but I would not call them personal website. (i.e. jsut a portfolio or "here are my socials")
I don't care much for labels. I have one rule for websites that everyone should follow (lol): whatever you are doing, keep doing it, stick to the theme/topic, stick to the update frequency. It is only wrong if you change either.
If you keep calling your dog a "cat" it won't start meowing.
The list is really disappointing, not only it's hard to find an actual digital garden on the list, most aren't even blogs, but simple resumes or portfolios.
I generally agree with the sentiment (and yes, internet should be treated as an utility). However, the reality is that the vast majority of people will not be able to self-host on their own hardware for a myriad of reasons (lack of skill, lack of money, lack of interest, etc.) That's not a reason to gatekeep them from having their own corner and claim it as theirs.
If you have a domain and your own site, even hosted on a colocated rack or in the cloud, you're already miles ahead of those that don't. And if you have a domain and can manage DNS records, then in the future that doesn't preclude you from "graduating" to your own hardware, if you so desire. The goal here is more or less self-sufficiency with web properties rather than a pure interpretation of "rent" vs. "own." Because at some point you have to rent something from someone (say, you're not running your own domain registry and registrar).
I don't want to gatekeep, I want to gate-unkeep! The way things are going, we're divinding the people and the companies into two classes, with the former having fewer rights and privileges than the latter.
I want everyone to have the RIGHT to participate in the Internet, should they have the interest to learn how to do it. That right is under pressure when we accept this division, when we use the excuse that "most people don't know how to", to justify taking away everyones right to even try.
If only companies have the right to participate on the internet, they are empowered even more to chose who should be allowed to even run a website.. It's a slippery slope that ends up in a very bad place, participation wise.
It becomes like the airline industry, where the companies pushing hardest for more regulation and red-tape are the oldest, those who made their fortunes back when it was easier and cheaper, and who now use their enourmous wealth to make it harder for new players to enter their market.
It's the same everywhere, when you start allowing power to concentrate.
There is a simple way though : have the ISPs provide all of this. If they can provide you a personal website, an email account and a NAS, they can also provide you a a personal website and an email account ON that NAS. (Especially now, with IPv6.)
(Which of course assumes that there are laws in place against lock-in, just like there are already laws in place against lock-in for your pick of ISPs and obligations for mobile carriers to transfer your phone number to another carrier.)
I think this only shifts the problem, the whole idea with the internet is a distributed network of computers that talk with each other, and if the computers at the edge (end users) can't do that, then it's no longer the internet, it's something else, more akin to cable-tv where there are "providers" and "consumers". The playing field stops being level.
Ah, I took it as you suggesting the ISPs providing VPS services for people..
Thing is, that edge infrastructure has been there from the beginning of broadband and is only recently beginning to slip away, with the advent of ISP NAT, agressive IP rotations, blocking of ports and not providing public IPs at all.
Yeah, I am still thinking how to evolve this into a useful, yet minimalist design as it grows. I am quite inspired by high-density websites (things that were de-facto in the late 90s), so will have to see how to incorporate that.
That being said, the meta-point about at-scale discovery is astute - it's largely unsolved for personal sites/digital gardens. And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck long-term. Will have to think through a solution as more content gets added.
The beauty of this site is that it's just HTML with minimal styling and JavaScript. If the current walled garden doesn't fit my needs at some point in the future, throwing it on another host takes less than 10 minutes, plus whatever the delay will be from DNS propagation. That's a built-in future resiliency, IMO.
I think it right to base the assessment of whether it is a walled garden on how easy it is for outsiders to access, and how easy it is to leave and take your community.
For viewing, I think you are doing well - your own domain name, which you can host where you like, and which currently doesn't impose many restrictions on who can view without signing up to anything.
But part of your community engagement is about having the community submit changes to you. And having that via GitHub is a walled garden - you can't make a PR without a GitHub account - or even search the code. And they say you are only allowed one free account - so one identity only - and I've heard credible reports they actively enforce it by IP matching etc..., and ban people if they suspect them of having two accounts.
Moving off GitHub isn't always that easy - you'd need to retrieve all your PRs, but then the problem is people who have GitHub accounts to engage with you would need to migrate their method of engagement.
So GitHub is absolutely a walled garden, and if you have a public GitHub, it is part of how you engage with your community.
Walled gardens do have the benefit of more people being in them - there is some barrier to entry to signing up on a random Gitea or Forgejo instance - but then you are beholden to the policies of the walled garden.
Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.
i do miss these sites. A bit nostalgic to them times where visiting a site had the information you are looking for and only the information you're looking for
