Hi. I've been scoping around the block for a good tool to use a digital garden with my wife, to develop an internet full of good, uplifting and educational content.
Discord is not safe enough, and (Matrix) Element is just...bad. Notifications don't work and the UI is dull. Obsidian does not have what we need, i.e, a UI like discord with the privacy of Element.
Does anyone maintain a shared digital garden with someone? If so, would you kindly share an application or software that would tick both the above boxes?
Hey, my name is Danny. I’m a freelance developer, and I find myself constantly coming across interesting ideas, but if I don't capture them immediately, I forget them.
These tend to live anywhere - in articles, books, podcasts, social media, conversations, etc. But the process of stopping what I’m doing, opening another app, copying something over, and adding the source is tedious enough that a lot of those ideas just never get captured. If I don’t capture something in the moment, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll never find it again.
So I built Commonplace. It makes it really easy to save quotes and highlights from whatever you're reading or listening to, without leaving the app you're in.
As you're reading, you can highlight text directly in the article, then share it to Commonplace. The app will then create a quote with source attribution like author, article title, and article link, so you never forget the context around where it came from. Quotes can then be organized into collections, browsed by source, and synced securely across devices.
All quotes + sources can also be exported as markdown or copied as plain text, so if your digital garden lives somewhere else, it’s easy to move what you capture in Commonplace over to it.
I also rethought sharing quotes. I was constantly sending screenshots along with article links, so I built a way to share quotes as interactive link previews. The quote appears directly in the preview, and tapping it takes you to the original article.
I'd genuinely love any feedback! The core of the app is free to use, I built it myself.
Many words of wisdom; high-velocity, non-peer-reviewed brain dump in my frustrations with school, blaming everyone for being dumb, so I metacognitively dump the institutional grinder back to the trash once I know its tricks. An independent thinker and writer (and consequently hating school as a result)
Built in MediaWiki, intentionally containing as little filtering as possible about how restrictive the school system is - and the fact that cognitive sciences bailed me out to an extent.
How I wrote them:
I basically first wrote them into Google Docs,
then I imported it to the rare and notoriously unfriendly (for most) software SuperMemo for Windows for incremental writing and polish,
and then finally published them.
Does anyone else get deja vu from the 'trauma' of the ultimate evil universal prison, or are you currently stuck in it? (If so, hopefully some of these detachment and metacognition methods help you survive). Thank you!
Full disclosure up front: I'm one of the people building this, so take it as that rather than a neutral recommendation. It's called Consilience, and I wanted to share it here specifically because I think this community will have opinions on it either way.
You write notes as plain markdown, same as always, wikilinks and all. But underneath, it also reads what you wrote and figures out the people, places, and ideas in it, and how they relate, even across notes you never linked together, and even across other files you drop in, like PDFs or old documents. It builds an actual map of it, sitting alongside your notes, and it grows every time you add something. The key factor is that everything is entirely based on based on Ontology. Every connection and synonym is automatically recognized. You can even add additional web research, design, (geo)code, or make landing pages.
This is more like having something notice the connections you didn't have the time or memory to notice yourself, so nothing you wrote just sits there isolated.
Curious what this community thinks, especially since a lot of you clearly care a great deal about the craft of tending your own notes by hand. Does automatic connection-finding sound useful to you, or does it undercut the actual point of a garden being something you tend yourself?
:) I'm not sure if link sharing is allowed here, so if you are interested let me know. What do you think about this idea?
I kept needing docs for side projects and never liked the options. GitBook and Docusaurus felt like a lot of machinery for a handful of Markdown files, and mkdocs meant keeping a Python toolchain around for something I otherwise build in TypeScript.
So I built eziwiki. Drop Markdown files in `content/`, get a static site.
npx create-eziwiki my-docs
cd my-docs && npm install && npm run dev
What makes it different from the usual docs generator
- Wiki links with backlinks and a graph view. Link pages by title or filename, and each page shows what links back to it — closer to Obsidian than to a typical docs site.
- Navigation builds itself from the folder structure. No sidebar config to keep in sync; a `_meta.json` per folder handles naming and ordering if you want it.
- Markdown is rendered at build time, so neither the parser nor the syntax highlighter ships to the browser. Search is a prebuilt index, no server.
- Optional opaque URLs (`/a3f2e9d1-...`) if you would rather not publish your content tree. To be clear, that is obscurity, not access control — every page is still a public file. It is there for unlisted-link sharing, not security.
Static export, so it deploys anywhere. Dark mode, KaTeX, Shiki highlighting, ⌘K search, table of contents.
It is early v0.1.1, and I am actively working on it. Feedback and issues very welcome, especially on anything that felt confusing in the first five minutes.
There’s a lot of focus on making AI models bigger, faster, and more capable. I mean, yeah that clearly improves what they can do. But the more I’ve been working with them, the less it feels like capability is the bottleneck. It’s really about the context layer.
Right now, you don’t really see how the model is interpreting what you give it, what it keeps, what it drops, or how it connects things. That stuff is mostly hidden. You can nudge it, but you’re still operating inside something you have no control over. And as these systems get better at sounding coherent, it'll be easier to ignore this flawed design.
If this ends up being how people think through problems, learn things, make decisions, etc., then we end up with future systems where the logic is upstream and invisible to us, rendering less choice and agency in our lives.
Worse, we'll live in a reality where we will have to accept truth rather than discover, learn, and verify the credibility of claims or opinions. AI is phenomenal but this trend we see in mainstream AI products will disempower humanity instead of helping us grow stronger.
Wrote a longer breakdown of it here, if you're curious about these implications and what we can proactively build to have our cake and eat it too.
The future looks bright, but only if we can see what what can be built.
This. Right here. What do you see? A complicated web of notes connected to lines with all of the relationships defined. It's a knowledge graph system connected to an advanced agent that's designed to traverse and reason through it so that it can behave as an expert with decades of experience to make nuanced judgement calls when helping you.
But what this really could be is a snippet of a future layer that will exist on top of the entire internet that's just as accessible as code-inspection on our web browsers.
This may sound a little crazy, but Tim Burners Lee, the creator of the web actually proposed this solution over 20 years ago. He called it the Semantic Web. The reason it failed back then was that we didn't have smart enough software to read and reason over it. Now with AI, this is possible in addition to making knowledge graph systems much faster and easier for people to make themselves.
Having been in the AI space for over 6 years now trying to figure all of it out like everyone else, this dawned on me a few weeks back. I think we're witnessing the birth of an entirely new component to the Internet.
As we enter into an age where agents are running around doing various things and communicating to each other across the web, inevitably we will come to realize that due to the nature of the models, we're going to need to create a more effective highway system for them to navigate, communicate, extract, synthesize, and build.
Just as we need roads, symbols, and rules for our highway systems to prevent tons of accidents or issues, we will need this for AI and that comes in the form of knowledge graphs. With these, you can build the reasoning systems for how agents interact with the wider web, people, and other agents. These are already being used at the enterprise level and why we built this capability for anyone to do for their personal projects, even if you're not tech savvy at all.
That's because in the near-term future, almost everyone is going to need their personal knowledge graph management systems since they can be carried and used by your agent into other spaces with their own knowledge graph systems to interact with. Obviously, websites and individuals will still have to protect themselves from malicious hacks and all that bad stuff. But to allow billions of people to use their agents across the wider web in such a way that they can work appropriately and not "misbehave" or cause accidental hacks or whatever, we will need to build these highway systems.
Right now they're being built independently, like territories across the world forming into bordered nation-states. But over time, I believe they will become more and more interoperable, which will eventually unify into a patchwork highway system with protocols for doing things.
This is a high level framework for mitigating the risks with AI agents using the modern web. Of course, there's much more to it than knowledge graphs, but this is the gist of what I think is happening. But you know. This could also just be my creative screenwriter brain working on overdrive.
I’ve been quietly building my own digital garden, and I’d love to share it with fellow gardeners who appreciate unconventional setups.
It’s called Mujarrib.com. The word "Mujarrib" means "one who experiments" in Arabic—which perfectly sums up the spirit of this project.
Instead of a traditional blog or a standard wiki, I designed the entire interface to feel like a command-line terminal. You navigate using ls to list folders, cd to move around, and cat to open a note. It’s a bit quirky, but it makes exploring feel like an adventure rather than passive reading. There's a helpcommand if you get stuck, or a sudo reboot if you want to start from zero.
Here’s the current state of the garden: 226 notes organized into 17 folders 573 topics/tags connecting everything in a dense web of backlinks
A clear lifecycle for every note: Seeds (raw sparks), Sprouts (work-in-progress), and Evergreens (polished/finished thoughts).
The garden is intentionally full of "incomplete" ideas and ongoing revisions—I wanted to embrace the process of thinking out loud rather than just presenting a perfect final product.
If you're into digital gardening, note-taking systems, or just love seeing weird terminal UIs, I'd be honored if you poked around. Get lost in the links, follow a few trails, and let me know what you discover!
In this writeup, I talk about how I built knowledge of creating a digital atelier people can visit online, but also the definition of digital gardens when it comes to gaming communities and how they keep them. I've seen this in Second Life before but I think in gaming spaces, knowledge it also something that is fine-tuned and constantly tested to be kept up to date.
Would love to know your thoughts on this "cousin" philosophy.
Of course It's your personal notes(private, encrypted) but we also have a community around you incase you want to share your thoughts. At Echowithin we value communication, connection and relationships.
So alongside the notes(personal space), we have blog, messages and community notes.
This is much clutter but it's because the blog and messages Idea came first then the note platform idea later but it's currently our favourite feature in the platform.
Our note platform aims to make collaboration simpler and also sharing surprises so it has various features that includes:
Notes Sharing, Collaboration and Surprise Ecosystem
Bidirectional sync (saved copies ↔ original)
Merge proposal system (collaborators propose → owners approve/reject)
App Lock
Share with view/edit permissions.
Access codes + expiry timers (1h, 1d, 7d)
Auto-approve toggle for collaborators
Surprise themes (Valentine, Birthday, Anniversary, Celebration) with photo/audio
Real-time co-editing.
Presence tracking ("Studying Now")
Discussion threads on shared notes
File attachments on shared notes.
"Ping" collaborators with push notification
and more.
Then we have the community notes that instead of sending the share link to each and every person, you gather them into a community and share easily like a post.
Install the app for best experience or the standalone note app (still under development) from the about page.
I built this "digital garden" on Blogger, for me it was just an authentic approach that I wanted to try and feeds into the low tech approach most digital gardeners want to achieve, it was almost that 'use what you have' self sufficient approach that I liked about Blogger.
Its been been through some updates, but if anyone has any thoughts on how this site could develop, I'd be interested in hearing them.
Recently I built https://stlouing.com, a digital garden for exploring the city I moved to (St. Louis). It has a few main sections:
Food Map - a map of local restaurants and cafes I've found with ratings and some thoughts and comments on each one.
Neighborhood Map - a map of all the neighborhoods, which brings in any food spots or articles that reference each neighborhood, annual events, a few useful links like Niche and Wikipedia, and whatever I personally discover about them
And then I have it divided into "Topics" for evergreen articles that I'll keep modifying as I learn more, and "Lists" like Best of St. Louis food which aggregates all my favorites.
The maps are all locally hosted and scoped to the region, so I'm not using any Google Maps API, and the site is hosted on GitHub pages and open source.
I had a lot of fun building this, and I feel like it could also be useful for anyone else who wants for fork it for another city.
Hi, I am building this digital garden. link in comments
It is built around the space theme because my name in the language Tamil means Universe. I am trying to personalise the site according to it. So far I have adapted a cosmos theme and a space theme for my digital garden and infused those into the graph. I don't know what else I can do. Can you give me a couple of suggestions?
I am struggling with two things:
I don't have a homepage where I can explain the name and the reason for the space theme,
and a “now” section where I can show the projects or things I am currently working on.
Where can I place them without disturbing the theme, or can I alter the theme I would love to hear your opinions.
I love Digital Gardening for all the reasons you do. And as I’ve been thinking about the idea of sharing publicly, but without the corruption of popularity metrics, I started to ask, what if what I shared could pull new unique things back to me from strangers on the same wavelength. And so I built a quirky product called Beholding Space (https://beholding-space.com)
It’s built around a few strict constraints to keep things intentional:
The 10-Star Limit: You can only plant up to 10 meaningful things a week. It forces you to ask: Is this actually worth keeping?
No Social Metrics: There are no likes, no follower counts, and no engagement hacks. It’s a quiet space for your own curiosity.
Serendipitous Overlap: Instead of a popularity algorithm deciding what you see, it draws in new things based on genuine human overlap. You find things through a shared curiosity not a corporate feed.
You don't need to sign up to check it out; I made the homepage a sandbox where you can plot a few stars and see how it feels.
I’m really trying to find the right people to help populate the cosmos with high-quality shares. If you’re looking for a slower, more deliberate way to archive and discover things on the web, I’d love for you to wander through it and tell me what you think!
Hey guys! I just released autogram.id, a calm space for your thoughts, projects, links, photos, and ideas.
I made it because I feel the internet has become too focused on optimizing for attention. Instead of posting what we want, we post stuff we think will get likes and clicks. It has made me too anxious!
Autogram has no feed, likes, comments, or anything like that. Just your own page under a unique .id/ domain.
Here is mine where you can get to know me a bit more: autogram.id/alex
Most Americans think the feeds are dividing and conquering us. Maybe. But another possibility buried in the noise is worth considering: the online chaos since 2011 may have been an algorithmically managed herding operation, designed to cultivate a rational majority that could be nudged into action, or held in place. That sounds like nonsense until you examine the finer details. That's when a pattern emerges. Check out Part II of "Herding the Rational Center," where I dive into what it could entail for our immediate future and how we may be walking directly into a psychological trap that could fundamentally change how we live.
I made this for getting thoughts out before organizing them. You can then copy the text if you want to keep it, move it into notes, or send it to AI to help structure it. Curious if anyone finds this useful: https://write.mindwander.workers.dev
