Hello!
Welcome to my digital garden. A garden of
interests,
ideas and experiemnts I'm
going to try and maintain and tend to for the next two years during my
time at
AUAS while
I'm studying
Frontend Design & Development,
which is the only two year associate degree programme in the
Netherlands that teaches you how to create and build websites in this
modern day and age that's tainted by generative AI, vibe-coded
websites and the same generic designs that can be found everywhere.
Similar to the lecturers at that
programme, I love the web and I want to create memorable experiences
with the limited time we have on this planet. For some that's decades,
for others it's only a few years.
What's a Digital Garden?
On October 17, 2015, Mike Caulfield published an essay online
known as
The Garden and the Stream, which while I haven't read it myself, I attended a lecture by
Justus Sturkenboom, a
real nerd that was yapping for about an hour on how he missed the
original, indie web he grew up with and how it's been tainted with by
these large corporations that are making a huge profit off of you
through the 'algorithm' constantly showing you advertisements which of
course, in it of itself are based off of your browsing habits on those
sites.
In particular, Justus argues that websites owned by companies like
Meta and X are the ones directly to blame for taining the world wide
web, by making it so rather than that you're discovering what's on the
internet, you're primarily interacting and submitting forms. There's
credibility to this claim: Think about how one would go about posting
something on Instagram, X/Twitter, BlueSky or Facebook. In essence,
you're essentially submitting a form which is rendered like a post for
the rest of the world to see, but only those that fall in line with
what that website's algorithm would want to push towards other users.
That in particular is important, because if we think back on how the
shitshow that was the US Presidential Elections of 2024, Elon Musk
spent billions of US Dollars to push conservative republican
views onto its users which skewed the algorithm so that Twitter/X uses
to supress liberal, left-leaning or democratic views on the platform.
And that's besides the investments he has made in Donald Trump's
campaign.
This only reinforces Justus's other argument: The content you create
on those platforms are not owned by you, nor is there any guarantee
that they would have your interest at heart. If you publish your
content on those social medias, you're beholdend to whatever the
current owners current terms and policies, but owners are subject to
change with time. No one thought that Twitter would fall into Elon
Musk's lap, yet it did, only worsening the platform in it's already
sorry state at the time.
The
indie web is a
solution to this problem. By creating and managing your own website,
you are giving yourself the opportunity to foster a home for your own
content to thrive, without being subject to another company's terms
and services, or being silenced by them due to the views of their
current owners. The best way to do this is by using the
POSSE method,
where you publish on your own site,
yet syndicate elsewhere. That means if you want
people to see your recent thoughts on something, you post about it on
the social media your friends already use, but for your 'full
thoughts', link to your site with the associated post. The same can be
done with photos! You pick a single photo you like, but if people want
to see your full gallery, refer them to your website.
That way, step by step you'll carve your own path on the web.
