Digital Garden Club
15 Sep 2025 - 01 Oct 2025
- A proposal for Protocol Symposium 2025
Problem
- People are making personal digital gardens, (roughly, personal Wikis). There's a variety of tools being used, from Roam and similar graph-based PKMs to purely homegrown. These are very idiosyncratic (by design). They also suffer from a certain reception problem; outside users don't know how to read/navigate them.
Proposal
- Plan: vibecode a website, leverage an existing protocol and database (TwinPages, Bill Seitz)
- Why: solves an actual problm for myself, maybe others. Involves creation of an API (aka protocol) for registering gardens, pages, resolving names.
- Done condition: site up and running (not achieved but I have a prototype (largely vibecoded))
Research
- Reddit - The heart of the internet
- I was looking for some kind of directory of digital gardens, but I couldn't find anything comprehensive. Does something like that exist? If not, would you like to see one?
Solutions
Garden/page registry
- Garden (site) level: maintain a central registry of digital gardens, perhaps indexed by topic or other metadata, for findability
- Some issues around topics, how do you decide two pages are about the same topic?
- Scaling issues. Easy to imagine for a few hundered DGs, beyond that the usual issues emerge
Earlier notes
- Level 0: just a simple dir, with some fields, and a form for people to submit
- Level 1: Gather common pages and build page directories (like Twin Pages but maybe less of a hack)
- Level 2: Let people curate the gardens they like, so login and user state
- MetaGarden! I wonder if this centralization runs counter to the spirit of the thing
- Way to monetize? Eh can't think of one. You could have some kind of pay-for-prominence scheme but that is dicey.
- Ads for platforms would make sense I guess
- Reddit - The heart of the internet
- This guy sells access! I wonder if anybody pays: Grafana | Everything I Know
Protocols
- APIs for registration and retrieval.
Feed generator
- A tool that monitors gardens for new or updated pages and generates a periodic chronological feed.
Protocol notes
- Is this interesting for Protocol thinking?
Screenshots
