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Digital gardening

A long(er) read.

Over the past few years I’ve been on a journey of disillusionment with the big digital platforms, who siphon away your attention and time for their money-making purposes, whose algorithms decide what they want you to see (building polarisation and discrimination along the way), and where everything is geared towards numbers and monetisation, those fake indicators of success. It felt increasingly terrible for my mental health.

In response, I have become more and more interested in a different way of existing in online spaces. It feels a bit like a return to my early years on the internet when I was cobbling together obscure websites in html back in 1997-2000, and was subscribed to email distribution lists that lived on university servers. Maybe it’s nostalgia, and maybe things are coming full circle, as they do, maybe both.

Many people have written more eloquently and in more detail about various aspects of all of this, but here are my key takeaways, with some links and further reading.


The IndieWeb

The IndieWeb stands in contrast to the corporate web, which is run by private multinationals interested in extracting users’ attention and data to return profit for shareholders. The IndieWeb isn’t an entity as such, more an approach and a way of thinking about your online presence. The principles are:

  1. You own your domain: it’s your primary space online, where you self-host your own content.
  2. You publish to your own site first: you can then repost or signpost elsewhere on any platform you want, but your content lives on your website.
  3. You own and control your content: it doesn’t belong to whatever corporation owns the platform you’re using, which can’t go out of business and lose all your content, or implement a new business model that puts half the content behind a paywall (I’m looking at you, Medium).

From centralised platform to open web, from corporate to indie, from being controlled to taking back control. I have moved my old writing that was on Medium, over to here – it’s filed under “Archive (old posts)”.

Links:


Optimisation

Optimising a website is deliberately working to improve its performance, visibility and ranking in search engines, conversion rate, etc. – and it relies heavily on analytics (and therefore tracking of visitor behaviour) to make data-driven decisions about what content performs well.

That sentence, right there, urgh.
That’s why I don’t have a cookies notification: I don’t collect any data about you.

Let’s face it, if you’re on this website we’ve probably met somewhere and I’ve said, “I’m very findable! My website is noreen.wales, as if I’m the only Noreen in Wales, hahaha!” I’m not after Google rankings. I care more about how this little digital space can support a human-first, relational interaction. Sure I pay attention to loading speed, design, navigation, and whether it’s usable on a mobile. (It is.) It’s got to be a pleasant experience for you and for me.

My main preoccupation is, does this website have stuff on it that’s useful and interesting?

Links:

  • No links, hah! I don’t want to talk about optimisation any more than this.

Digital gardens

A digital garden (isn’t that a charming descriptor?) is an online space where you tend and grow your thoughts, ideas, and knowledge. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time. In contrast to more formal blogs, where you press “publish” when the piece is polished and complete, in a digital garden you hoard bits and pieces that are feeding your thinking. They evolve, get updated, you revisit things when new data comes in. You might cross-reference them. They’re often not linear or chronological.

I’m using the blog part of the website as a digital garden, so posts have the initial date on them, but I reserve the right to go back, add, comment, expand. When I edit, it will be visible. I like working in the open (= showing people the work you’re doing, as you’re doing it). I also tag the posts (and I have determined a shortlist of tags) so that I, and you, can look at the themes I’m thinking about, and all the posts clustered under that theme.

A digital garden isn’t performative. It’s a bunch of work-in-progress, experiments, and half-formed thoughts. I have plenty of questions in mine. To be honest, I’m writing primarily for myself – but I’m happy to share in case it’s of interest and of use to others. (There isn’t a “content marketing strategy” and I’m not using it to “build a personal brand”. EDIT: well, maybe a bit, by the very nature of posting things online it builds an image of who I am; hopefully my personal brand is, I’m interested in X and Y and this is where I’m at with it at the moment.)

A digital garden is organic, authentic and personal.

Links:


Social media

I deleted my Facebook account first, along with the Instagram I barely used, and then the WhatsApp messaging app (I switched to Signal, which works pretty much the same but is run by a non-profit). I deleted both my personal and professional Twitter accounts (that was before it rebranded as X). I deleted my LinkedIn account in a fit of pique when I got stuck in a Kafkaesque loop trying to simply update my email. (I don’t miss it.)

Instead, I now use Mastodon, where I have a personal account (of mainly cats and artists) on a server called Sunny Garden; and a me-in-work account on the Welsh instance (toot.wales*). Mastodon is open-source and decentralised, part of the Fediverse, and the caretakers of the servers I belong to are committed to moderation against racism, sexism, and transphobia. There is no advertising. It takes a minute to get your head around how it works, because it’s so different from the big algorithmic, profit-driven, centralised platforms, but therein lies its beauty. There I can organically, and slowly, find like-minded people and build my communities of interest.

(*) Where Twitter had tweets, Mastodon has toots! In French, they are ‘pouets’.

EDIT: I am also dipping my toe into Bluesky (also a decentralised network), which seems to have a bit of an “early days of Twitter when it was good” sort of vibe. Many people from my old twitter networks seem to be finding their way there. Luckily, there are some handy tools like Openvibe that help me keep things in one place (thereby lessening the digital clutter and number of accounts I need to check).

Links:


Misc bits

  • Feed readers are making a comeback as a way to keep up to date with new blog posts if you don’t follow someone on social media. I like The Old Reader.
  • I have a tiny newsletter that basically says “there’s something new on the blog”, um, when there is something new on the blog. I use Buttondown, an independent email newsletter platform, built with privacy in mind (mine and my subscribers’).
  • I’m also thinking about data security and privacy, and about our widespread dependence on Google for, well, what feels like everything. I have switched my email and calendar to Proton (which is open source, has encryption built in, and blocks trackers). I’ve not divested myself of everything Google yet, but it’s a start.
  • I use Mozilla Firefox for my web browser, which isn’t perfect and comes with its own ethical concerns despite being open-source, focused on privacy, and run by a non-profit. But it’s working for me for now. I have added the AdBlock Plus and Ghostery Tracker ad blockers. The internet without ads is a much more zen place to be.

Link:

  • We need to rewild the internet (essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on Noema) – a very long, thoughtful read (with audio if you prefer to listen to it).

A forest of mixed conifers and deciduous, with sunshine slanting through the trees and into the undergrowth. There are plants at ground level, bushes and saplings, and taller trees. Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash.

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash