Chatty Community Gardens
If you're new to the concept of digital gardening, there's no better long-version than Maggie Appleton's "brief history":
Mike Caulfield
For a shorter summary, Maggie's follow-up on Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks puts it quite succincty:
Gardening is a practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public.
Gardens are…
a) Explorable, rather than structured as a strictly linear steam of posts. This is usually achieved through deeply interlinking notes where readers can navigate freely through the content.
b) Slowly grown over time, rather than creating “finished” work that you never touch again. You revise, update, and change your ideas as they develop, and ideally find a way to indicate the “done-ness” state to your reader.
No framework, platform, plug-in, service, or fun interface element defines a garden, and never will. Do whatever works for you, at whatever technical level feels comfortable. Just keep gardening 🪴
Another outtake from Maggie's Brief History:
Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it’s both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It’s less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.
Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years.
Gardening sits in the middle. It’s the perfect balance of chaos and cultivation.
This should not however be interpreted as the Chaos Streams and the Cultivated Performance sides of the app-archetypes spectrum existing outside of the 'digital gardening' paradigm.
By her own account, Maggie's Brief History post was initially drafted (i.e. seeded) on Twitter before it was reclaimed and leveled-up to an even more gardenable blog post.
Remember:
No framework, platform, plug-in, service, or fun interface element defines a garden, and never will.
The microblog format lowers the barrier-to-entry of writing as a regular practice. There's a great summation (and elicitation to product builders) of this affordance in the great Glue Comic, which we will come back to again at the conclusion of this article.
Most people are bad writers, but excellent text messagers.
Their writing is bad because they try to sound smart once they open Microsoft Word.
But when they text, they write with clarity and enthusiasm.
If you're stuck, write like you're sending an important text message.
As someone who long struggled to understand what the point of twitter was for all those people who seemed to thrive in the firehose-mediated chaos of it, these types of explanations softened my thinking and made me properly empathetic to their use case.
I hadn't fully appreciated these writers' predicament because I personally just never needed a microblog to do that; I had already found my own collaborative writing assistant in chatrooms and forums.
Cozy spaces are garden seeders
Two or more people together in a group chat room; that's a minimum-viable community.
A few drivers together in a group chat; that's a minimum-viable ride-sharing platform.
One person together with an LLM in a chat interface; that's a minimum-viable AI assistant.
Chat is where big ideas are incubated
Group Chat fits neatly into the platform archetype Maggie Appleton thinks of as the Cozy Web, to which I've replied with Cozy Community Software.
Maya
Open Indie
So, with utmost respect, I would suggest a tiny edit:
Gardening is a practice that treats a --personalwebsite as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public.
That puts it more in line with the model laid out by Joel Hooks:
I'm not a taxonomist.
I don't have a formal information design background.
For the most part I just wing it ad hoc and hope for the best.
My personal digital garden extends well beyond this domain. Twitter, Notion, Roam, Slack, Discord, and even Apple Notes all represent digital plots where I tend and water ideas. It's relaxing to sit down to the keyboard and do a little gardening.
💯
Digital Community Gardening
In the virtual world we think of digital gardens first and foremost as individual, personalized spaces. Yet in our physical cities the pro-social concept of Community Gardens is much beloved and far more accessible to the majority of city dwellers who can only dream of tending to a privately owned garden in their backyard.
Community gardens are a result of an inequitable scarcity in individual land ownership, but it also happens to be a wonderful way to be in soul-enriching communion with our neighbors and fellow cultivators, not to forget our more-than-human friends.
I’m not a yet a community gardener in my analog neighborhood, but I know myself to be one in the digital space of the internet. That is, I’m lifelong Interwebs Gardener 🧑🌾
And while I'm fairly medium-agnostic, the chatroom has organically become my primary record-of-thought. So much of my thinking is made better in dialogue with others; dialogically.
Better Together
From messy thought, neat thought:
The pattern of alternating messy thought with neat thought seems to come up across many disciplines. (...)
The argument seems very related to the age-old “innovative vs. efficient thinking” debate (...) – in which the conclusion of their research was that both modes of thought are useful, and help each other when alternated, starting with innovative thought. Here’s a little refresher visual from the book:
In design, people alternate between being generative (e.g. “encourage wild ideas!” in a brainstorm), and then focusing down using a more critical or pragmatic lens. This can also be called “creating choices vs. making choices.”
Max Ray talked about the pedagogical value of creating space for students to share what he (and others) call “rough draft thinking” in math classes. This helps students understand how there are different ways to begin thinking about how to think about a problem, and ultimately be less afraid of just getting started.
We think better together, with a combination of mess meets structure. Our wisdom of the crowd is our superpower.
Nate Hagens
Key excerpt from this 4:30min clip:
We don’t reason monologically (singular thinker)
we actually reason dialogically (multiple conversant thinkers).
You take a standard reasoning task, you give it to the best and brightest, and only 10% of university students get it.
You replace that with four people who are encouraged to talk to each other and the success rate goes from 10% to 82% reliably.
This whole podcast reference, clip & quote was reposted from the Muni Town chat space (currently accessible via Discord and Matrix, with more to come).
Our Muni chat-room is my default Tool for Thought, so I drop the majority of my notes there. A good 50% of the thought blurbs submit to that shared space elicit responses from fellow thinkers; novel new ideas are formed, perennial ideas are refined.
Chat in the most casual, chatty sense has its limits though. For information to be synthesized into knowledge, the rate of messaging needs to be slowed down to make room for less reactive and urgent, more deliberate and long-form expression.
Forums - with their index boards and threaded messages - serve this function perfectly. The Cozy Web's contribution to the digital garden happens through threads, aka topics. Specifically, threads with hyperlinks, so they can point to one another. That’s the essence of it.
The trick to a great Digital Community Garden (and consequent next-gen communications platform and infrastructure, imho) is a balancing act between the ‘chat’ and ‘forum‘ paradigms; two sides of a unified whole, moving fast and slow interchangeably.
We need a blurring of the lines.
Life of a digital message
Think of messages as living information artifacts. As content blobs they can morph through many different forms, from ephemeral musings to everlasting tomes of shared understandings.
Let's consider the lifecycle of a digital message (a virtualized expression) as contained and transferred through different form factors.
Thinking mind
At first there's just a thought. It may not even be written down anywhere yet; it just exists as some vague idea in someone's head, perhaps only haphazardly digitized in a mess of email drafts and txt files on your old laptop.
Chatty ideation
Once a message is expressed in a chat room (any group of people chatting together) it has taken on its initial recordable form for the purpose of storage & transmission.
After some back-and-forth the essence of the message will become evident as a recurring topic of discussion. (a label is formed)
Threaded idea composites
A series of related messages can then be glued together to make a thread. By synthesizing multiple chatty idea fragments into a cohesive micro-thesis, the flow of discussion can be focused towards an end-goal.
In the context of a thread, comments are written in response to the opening thesis, as opposed to the chatty context where you're generally responding to any message immediately preceding yours.
Article synthesis
With a draft thesis sufficiently scrutinized and supplemented, a final synthesis brings it all together into a carefully edited article; a fully grown knowledge artifact.
And at every stage of our message exchange, each new bit of information feeds back into our collective minds to form new thoughts.
—
Not every message takes this exact path, but the above is a common example of how community platforms act as a seeding ground for ideas to go from noisy information blobs to restful knowledge gardens, in what game theory and systems-design people like to call a generative feedback loop.
For current group-messaging software this is the gap that needs filling. This realization stirred my thinking towards the work of Communal Bonfires.
Open Indie
Fluid Content Containers
Once the message container is thought of as more form-agnostic, many intriguing cases of Content Fluidity come to mind:
- convert a thread to a channel (expand room size)
- convert a channel to a thread (good for archiving)
- move selected posts from one channel to another
- move thread from one channel to another
- move thread to another Space
- move channel to another Space (change owners)
- move select posts from one thread to another
- merge two threads
- merge two channels
- merge two spaces
This is the sort of porosity that, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to new forms of federated webrings; ways for communities to open bridgeways to one another across the social interwebs.
If you like what's being sketched out here, let me put one last elicitation in front of you. I recommend anyone intrigued by the concept of chatty gardening and sense-making go check out Chatting with Glue which envisions some of the possibilities ahead of us with a playfully visual and evocative presentation style:
From a mess to an opus. -- Conversation is already a writing process. Let's give it the tools it needs to thrive. -- "conversations take random walks through events and ideas in a manner determined by the associative networks of the participants".
This is why Roomy is taking a big, risky bet on CRDT tech as a git-for-writing (and socialized proof-of-work), because it deals very well with content that grows and evolves over time.
We want the ability to shape-shift and transition a thread to a channel or vice versa, and several other such moves or mergers of content benefiting from having the git-like edits history offered by the CRDT storage, which makes all these changes perfectly reversible and non-destructive.
In closing, I'll give Maggie the last word:
Keeping your garden on the open web also sets you up to take part in the future of gardening. At the moment our gardens are rather solo affairs. We haven’t figure out how to make them multi-player. But there’s an enthusiastic community of developers and designers trying to fix that.
