The idea of a digital garden is about having a space in the digital realm where ideas, thoughts, or knowledge, are seeded, tended to, evolve and flourish.
While the term is a few decades old, the inspirations behind it are grounded in the early web's ethos of interconnection and open sharing, and ideas from other disciplines such as cognitive science, philosophy, and even political ideologies.
Personal Knowledge Systems(PKMs) - the idea of building systems for personal knowledge management, i.e. organizing, thinking, annotating, and learning. In other words, the primary beneficiary here is oneself, rather than the public. Notecards, mind maps, and personal wikis have been traditionally used to do this.
Early Web - The Web was built around the idea of having an interconnected web of information that facilitates navigating between related concepts and articles.
Zettelkasten - the idea of capturing information , or ideas, in small chunks and categorizing and connecting them based on their themes and relationships. While this was originally done using physical note cards, there are plenty of tools that help you build a similar system digitally.
File over App Philosophy - The main idea here is that the ideas and knowledge are more important than the platform, and hence it's more important for the content to be transferrable and preservable than the ephemeral tools we use to capture it.
It's subjective how people use and think about blogs, but in the most prevalent way blogging is done, there's a timestamp associated with a post, which has interesting implications.
Because it has timestamps, there's an implicit expectation of completeness to posts. A garden is ever-evolving. You're never done tending to the garden, and there's never a time when the garden is perfect. And because it isn't that it's easier to document fragmented and incomplete thoughts and make it truly a place for reflection, clarification and learning.
Because of the notion of completeness, a post isn't also frequently updated. It's more like a snapshot in time, which means that it becomes outdated. A digital garden however is meant to be updated as your ideas about a topic evolve, so it evolves as you do. There's this idea of evergreen gardens, which nicely captures the essence of it. A garden is meant to be tended and went back to on a regular basis. You check for the health of the garden, remove the weeds, and make sure it's thriving.
Because a blog is usually chronological, there's an element of linearity to it. There's the next post, the previous post, and a sorted order of things. Gardens are meant to be non-linear, and interconnected. So you're not necessarily working on one post at a time, but rather multiple, potentially related concepts. During the journey of exploration you don't know how they will intersect or influence each other. There's beauty in serendipity, epiphanies, and non-intuitive connections between ideas!
Check out the following resources to learn more, and the following for how to start cultivating your own garden - Digital Gardening for Non-technical Folks - Maggie Appleton. For a deeper journey into the history and ethos check out A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, also from Maggie Appleton.
Learning/working in public - Digital gardens help overcome the barrier of fear that comes from thinking about sharing your work publicly. Social media is a shitstorm, with sub-optimal incentive structures that reward quantity, and popularity/virality over depth. Blogs structurally encourage you to have complete thoughts on a topic in a chronological manner without helping you build on top of it. Digital gardens however makes it easy to add a drop to the pool of information from your past. And since it's primarily geared toward your learning and growth, you feel less exposed. It attracts people who have similar interests, and are intentional about finding such spaces, so it minimizes the chances of a random person doom-scrolling stumbling upon your content.