The modern internet is dominated by giants like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies. it’s easy to feel like a visitor, or perhaps, just an entry in a massive database. We share our thoughts, photos, and ideas, but on ground that we don’t truly own.
What if there was a better way? A cozier, more personal space where you are the sole landlord and gardener? This is the heart of the concept known as the Digital Garden.
🏡 What is a Digital Garden? (And Why Do We Need It?)
Think of your current online presence,it’s represented in a random fashion on every website you have an account on. People don’t truly “know”.
A Digital Garden is different. It’s not a magazine; it’s a living, breathing ecosystem.
- It’s Ever-Evolving: Instead of finished “posts,” a Garden contains “notes,” “seeds,” and “evergreen” articles. A note might be a rough thought, a seed is an idea just starting to sprout, and an evergreen article is a concept that is continually revisited, updated, and improved over months or even years.
- It’s Personal, Not Performative: The main audience is you, your friends and people who randomly stumble upon what you write via search engines. The purpose is to think out loud, connect disparate ideas, and learn in public. It’s a place for curiosity, not clicks.
- It’s Cozy and Yours: Maybe I’m a bit old… but I like my cozy place more. It brings back the feeling of the old web, where sites were eccentric, personal, and connected through things like webrings—simple links that passed visitors from one unique corner to the next.
We need the Digital Garden because it offers an escape from the frantic, commercialized churn of social media. It’s a slow, deliberate act of creation in a fast-paced world.
👑 The Main Idea is Personal Sovereignty
This idea of a Digital Garden is much more than just a different way to format a website. It is an act of reclaiming intellectual and personal sovereignty. There are existing projects like indieweb, ZenDenPen (which I’m currently using), Neocities, Nekoweb.
Sovereignty simply means supreme and independent authority. When you post on a corporate platform, you are giving away a significant part of that authority:
| Corporate Platform Reality | Digital Garden Reality |
|---|---|
| The Platform owns the space. They can change the rules, the look, or even shut down your account—and all your content vanishes. | You own the space. You choose the tools, the design, and the structure. Your content remains yours forever, free from corporate control. |
| Algorithms control visibility. Your ideas are only seen if the algorithm deems them worthy of the current profit model. | You control visibility. You link to other gardens, people bookmark you, and your ideas flow organically, not dictated by an invisible hand. |
| The focus is on “engagement.” Every post is a plea for likes, shares, and validation, leading to burnout and superficiality. | The focus is on “evolution.” The goal is to grow your understanding and create a lasting, personal resource. |
By building and tending your own site, you are establishing a refuge—a place where your work is protected and exists on your terms.
🛠️ Owning Your Place The Tools of the Gardener
You don’t need complex, expensive tools to start gardening. The spirit of this movement is rooted in simple, sustainable technology.
ZenDenPen is a fantastic example of the kind of simple, robust hosting that facilitates this. It’s akin to the spirit of the old Geocities, or the newer Neocities or Nekoweb or other independent hosts, offering a stable foundation for static sites. I’m curently using Hugo to generate my personal website out of Markdown files. I edit my HTML only once then all I do is write, without focusing on the complexities of HTML or CSS. If you want, you can also write the HTML yourself but most people don’t have that time.
Another excellent website is HandCraftedWeb. It’s just a web directory of people who have their own websites. It focuses on beautiful simplicity, clarity, and performance, prioritizing the human reader over complex, bloated technologies.
The tool doesn’t matter as much as the mindset: Own your code, own your words, and own your platform.
🎁 The Quiet Gift of the Garden
The Digital Garden is a quiet rebellion against the attention economy. It’s a return to the simple pleasure of building something for its own sake.
It’s about having a place online that feels like home. A place with rough edges and ongoing projects, where you can share whatever you want and connect with others in a meaningful, unhurried way.
Start a garden. Reclaim your digital self.