8 ms·

BlogScroll – An open directory of personal sites and blogs

276 points by mahirsaid 2y ago

dend 2y ago
Look at the front page of HN - see my project randomly. Thank you for sharing! The goal with this site is precisely that, share people's digital gardens. If you have a site to add, please open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/new?assignees=dend&labels=enhancement&template=suggest-new-site.md&title=%5BSITE+REQUEST%5D https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/new?assignee... If your site is self-hosted (that is, not on medium.com or Substack or the likes, or if it is - has a custom domain), I'd be happy to add it. My goal for this year is to massively grow the list.
- pmlnr 2y ago
  You could create an alternative, OPML version of the page, which is/was specifically for blogrolls :)
  - dend 2y ago
    https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198 https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198 Opened an issue to track and implement. Thank you for the suggestion!
- 0xEF 2y ago
  Does it have to be self-hosted? My sites, for example, are generally hosted on one of the various VPS services, some big and well known like Linode, others smaller like 1984.hosting. I move around too much to be worried about setting up servers in my homes, etc, but fully support the smolweb movement and love making my own tiny html places.
  - fm2606 2y ago
    Not the OP but I think hosting on a VPS is valid. "Self-admin" may be a better term, I don't know. You are still "indie" and not bound to any corporate culture. You are in full control down to the OS but not the hardware so yeah it counts. I once questioned if hosting on VPS was covered under the term self-hosting and got down voted. It was a legit question, as is your question, but I guess people took it as if I was saying that it isn't self-hosting.
- yakkomajuri 2y ago
  Love to see people thinking about this! You might be interested in some of the ideas here: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-ish.md https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is... Happy to have a chat if you think it makes sense. I dropped the project above a year ago.
bigfatkitten 2y ago
As much as I love the idea, I can't help but see some irony in an index of sites outside the Big Tech walled gardens being hosted on a major walled garden.
- dend 2y ago
  The beauty of this site is that it's just HTML with minimal styling and JavaScript. If the current walled garden doesn't fit my needs at some point in the future, throwing it on another host takes less than 10 minutes, plus whatever the delay will be from DNS propagation. That's a built-in future resiliency, IMO.
  - A1kmm 2y ago
    I think it right to base the assessment of whether it is a walled garden on how easy it is for outsiders to access, and how easy it is to leave and take your community. For viewing, I think you are doing well - your own domain name, which you can host where you like, and which currently doesn't impose many restrictions on who can view without signing up to anything. But part of your community engagement is about having the community submit changes to you. And having that via GitHub is a walled garden - you can't make a PR without a GitHub account - or even search the code. And they say you are only allowed one free account - so one identity only - and I've heard credible reports they actively enforce it by IP matching etc..., and ban people if they suspect them of having two accounts. Moving off GitHub isn't always that easy - you'd need to retrieve all your PRs, but then the problem is people who have GitHub accounts to engage with you would need to migrate their method of engagement. So GitHub is absolutely a walled garden, and if you have a public GitHub, it is part of how you engage with your community. Walled gardens do have the benefit of more people being in them - there is some barrier to entry to signing up on a random Gitea or Forgejo instance - but then you are beholden to the policies of the walled garden.
    - dend 2y ago
      Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.
diegocg 2y ago
Funny how we have gone back to web directories
- mikro2nd 2y ago
  Webrings are also seeing some revival. Seems that actual curation by actual human beings is better than algorithmic or "AI" slop.
- mxuribe 2y ago
  I don't know if its only me...but years ago when google was in its early days, i considered google to have authority because of its "completeness", and its unobtrusive experience. For some time now, i have not thought of google in that same, good way. Hence, if i wish to find quality content and good results, i use other mechanisms which have earned my trust and respect...some of those include open directories, web rings, old school type blogrolls, RSS feeds, suggestions from the fediverse, recommendations from family, friends, and colleagues, etc. Do i still use a search engine? Sure! I use DDG (which behind the scenes isn't much better than google since they're dependent on Bing/MS)...but nowadays i diversify my expedition a bunch more when searching for something. Gone are the days where i depend as much on big tech (or at least, try my damn best to minimize my dependence on big tech in as many areas of my on/offline life).
freetonik 2y ago
Very cool! As someone else mentioned already, OPML export would be cool, especially if it’s per category (personal, design/ux, etc.) I also curate a list of blogs as part of my blog discovery/search engine/reader project: https://minifeed.net/blogs https://minifeed.net/blogs
- dend 2y ago
  Great job on building a delightful experience! I really like the design. For OPML, tracking the enhancement here: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198 https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198
- nelsonfigueroa 2y ago
  I remember discovering minifeed.net not too long ago here on HN. Cool project! I like how you show related posts from other blogs when viewing an item. It's nice for discovering new blogs.
  - freetonik 2y ago
    Thanks! I still don't feel ready to do a proper "Show HN" with it though :) The related posts are generated with the help of a vector database (Cloudflare Vectorize [1]). I take post titles and descriptions as input, vectorize and store the results in the vector DB. Then for each post, I find 10-15 related posts and store the results in a separate table (it's a plain one-to-many SQL table). This is done because querying the vector DB is not super fast, and I wanted Minifeed to load under 500ms (according to my status page tracking, users in Europe for some reason experience the fastest loading times of 100-200ms! [2]). I also set up a scheduled job which regularly updates the relations (since there are new posts every day, and some of them may become "related" to existing posts). I've been meaning to write a blog post about the overall architecture of Minifeed, there are lots of small components related to RSS parsing, updates, caching, etc. 1. https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/ 2. https://status.minifeed.net/ https://status.minifeed.net/
    - 2y ago
MrThoughtful 2y ago
Some are examples of good design ideas.
lemming 2y ago
Kagi also has an occasionally delightful small web index: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web. It’s nicely integrated into their search results too.
- ajmurmann 2y ago
  And of course there is always https://marginalia.nu https://marginalia.nu
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    and https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ with a "Surprise" button
    - mxuribe 2y ago
      Thanks for this refresher! For the life of me i recalled that there was a sort of search engine for the smol web, but could not recall its name! Thanks to you for finding it again for me! :-)
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  In case anyone's interested, I keep a small list of indie sites here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-content/ https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-co... Included: gardens, personal websites, zines, and toys.
- misfitgentleman 2y ago
  You can get RSS feeds of random indie web posts. I’ve found a few good sites this way. https://indieblog.page/rss https://indieblog.page/rss
  - mahirsaid 2y ago
    do you mean the RSS feeds you're getting are about new indie sites and domains for them? if so i would like to know some of the RSS feeds your using.
j3s 2y ago
cool, a garden index! love that they included an RSS feed too (https://blogscroll.com/index.xml https://blogscroll.com/index.xml) - i'm sticking that in my feed reader immediately. it sounds nice to have a few random new digital garden sites to peruse once in awhile.
openrisk 2y ago
Cool but this will grow unworkable as the number of entries increases and will require some sort of filtering / searching. Even pure signal can be overwhelming these days when so much good stuff exists. Which brings us to the (as far as I know unsolved) question of supporting large scale discovery of the web without drifting into enshittification. Some sort of decentralized index that will be distributed in a torrent-like manner might work but that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc. Bottom line is that the walled gardens did not exist, they evolved because the original web was missing critical components of usability. They exploited a vacuum. To fill the vacuum with something more benevolent we need to go back and solve these problems. The rest will be history.
- dend 2y ago
  Yeah, I am still thinking how to evolve this into a useful, yet minimalist design as it grows. I am quite inspired by high-density websites (things that were de-facto in the late 90s), so will have to see how to incorporate that. That being said, the meta-point about at-scale discovery is astute - it's largely unsolved for personal sites/digital gardens. And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck long-term. Will have to think through a solution as more content gets added.
- klez 2y ago
  > that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc. IMHO that's the beauty of it. Sometimes I want to be hit with everything the web has to offer. But some other times I do want curated lists of links organized by category with opinionated criteria for inclusion.
rednafi 2y ago
Love the idea, but I’m not sure how well it will scale. I’ve seen similar lists before and even went out of my way to include my blog there, only to never find that page again. That said, I’m loving this renewed interest in building our own little corners on the internet. I have mine[1] too. [1]: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com
- mahirsaid 2y ago
  With the current state of the internet today,having control of your digital assets and identity make more sense. i would like to see them more useful and sophisticated but i understand its hard without large capital. It's amazing what some people can create on their own. Leaving your identity to be represented by big tech is turning out to be only in their interests.
mikae1 2y ago
Weird. I love a good link list, but most links I clicked were just regular portfolio websites, not digital gardens in the gardens vs. streams[1] sense. Does the creator not know what a digital garden is? [1] https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-and-ui-popup-indie-web-camp-session-2020 https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-...
- dend 2y ago
  Fair feedback. In my eyes, I treat any personal site as a digital garden - I am not really sticking to the "pure" definition. If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? I think it is, but that's my own take on it. I intentionally try to avoid sites that are in any shape _not_ personal or otherwise representative of an individual trying to stake their little corner of the internet.
  - mikae1 2y ago
    Thanks for replying. :) > If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? That's really stretching the definition IMO. What characterizes a garden is the slow growth and constant pruning — the making of a personal wiki. https://indieweb.org/digital_garden https://indieweb.org/digital_garden and https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history are good intros to gardens. Most of the websites I visited seemed to be and forget sites targeted at potential employers.
    - dend 2y ago
      I amended the description to better reflect the work. Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate the pointers to the IndieWeb and Maggie's sites.
    - wink 2y ago
      I dunno, sounds more like some gate keeping, or maybe I'm biased because I hate the term for no discernible reason. > has content of different levels of development, is imperfect and often a playground for experimentation, learning, revising, iteration, and growth for diverse content So because I polish my "posts" to a certain degree before publishing it's not a digital garden? Because 50% of my blog posts are "timeless" in a sense that they're about... stuff that exists.. not current dvelopments it's not a digital garden? Becuase I never delete stuff (as if people with wikis would delete stuff :P)... and so on. I mean, I couldn't care less but I feel (and this seems to be a common theme) that the indieweb people are mostly dogmatic about their definitions and not very encouraging (also why I tried to take part in the irc channel years ago and left, frustrated). But yeah, if someone want to own the definition of blog and digital garden and not accepting a certain overlap with "personal website", sure.
nomemory 2y ago
Not a garden but I also curtate links that I find interesting here: https://www.andreinc.net/links/ https://www.andreinc.net/links/ And maintain an active blogroll with blogs I follow: https://www.andreinc.net/blogroll https://www.andreinc.net/blogroll
BaudouinVH 2y ago
How outside the "Big Tech" gardens is blogging on Github ? https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-github/ https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-g... My definition of property is more restricted : either having hosting somewhere as independent as possible or self-hosting on Raspberry Pi e.g. My two cents
- vedranm 2y ago
  I have a website [1] on GitHub Pages. It's extremely easy to move out of GitHub, since it is on a domain I control, which is not the case with e.g. social profiles. That fact that the site is static makes it really easy to host it basically anywhere where a web server exists. The site is deployed using a GitHub Actions workflow, which happens to be the only GitHub-specific feature, but a similar script could easily be written in the future for another hosting if necessary. [1] https://group.miletic.net/ https://group.miletic.net/
vouaobrasil 2y ago
These days, I prefer smaller websites more and more. But I do like Substack because they are sort of like a personal website, since there are very few social features and generally you can just visit one person's Substack without seeing ANY content from anywhere else.
khafra 2y ago
When reading the title I thought of "walled gardens," as in collaborative sites with heavy moderation/curation, but a lot of these seem to be just personal sites with careful attention to aesthetics, function, and content. And how can I trust any list like that which doesn't include gwern.net?
- nilsherzig 2y ago
  A walled garden usually refers to a nice to use software ecosystem (the garden) with the twist that it stops users from escaping / communicating with the outside (the wall). Apple products tend to be the example for that. The title properly refers to the fact that these sites aren't hosted on substack / medium / some other pre build environment.
prmoustache 2y ago
Bring back the webrings!
Emigre_ 2y ago
Really nice, but you could consider to move away from Big Tech altogether; there are alternatives to GitHub.
flpm 2y ago
The Internet has a big discoverability problem now that search has a big advertising conflict of interests. The only way to find web "human" content is to rely on the curation of other humans. Funny enough mining those links is what made Google the giant it is now. But this time around we will not be fooled by the next "don't be evil" tech giant :D
- yakkomajuri 2y ago
  I already posted a top-level comment about this but I tried to tackle this specific problem when I built Recess (https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess) which might interest you. Never got any traction so I dropped it. The idea was to be a content aggregator for what I called "siloed content" (personal websites, blogs, etc). The ideas are outlined here if anyone's keen: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-ish.md https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is... I'm happy for someone to take this over too even if they're interested. It's MIT-licensed.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deafpolygon 2y ago
Isn't GitHub a "Big Tech" walled garden?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Anyone can view and download content from it and transferring content to another site involves three commands “git pull …”, “git remote set-url origin…”, and “git push”.
yakkomajuri 2y ago
I've thought about this problem before and built Recess as one way to approach this and related "issues". It never got traction so I dropped it but someone might be interested in the ideas behind it: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess
sylware 2y ago
"walled" is too nice for what Big Tech is actually doing. What they are doing is literaly digital jails "for you own security........"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
clircle 2y ago
Yeah but can any of them write well?

276 points by mahirsaid 2y ago

dend 2y ago

Look at the front page of HN - see my project randomly. Thank you for sharing! The goal with this site is precisely that, share people's digital gardens. If you have a site to add, please open a GitHub issue: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/new?assignees=dend&labels=enhancement&template=suggest-new-site.md&title=%5BSITE+REQUEST%5D https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/new?assignee... If your site is self-hosted (that is, not on medium.com or Substack or the likes, or if it is - has a custom domain), I'd be happy to add it. My goal for this year is to massively grow the list.

pmlnr 2y ago
You could create an alternative, OPML version of the page, which is/was specifically for blogrolls :)
- dend 2y ago
  https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198 https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198 Opened an issue to track and implement. Thank you for the suggestion!
0xEF 2y ago
Does it have to be self-hosted? My sites, for example, are generally hosted on one of the various VPS services, some big and well known like Linode, others smaller like 1984.hosting. I move around too much to be worried about setting up servers in my homes, etc, but fully support the smolweb movement and love making my own tiny html places.
- fm2606 2y ago
  Not the OP but I think hosting on a VPS is valid. "Self-admin" may be a better term, I don't know. You are still "indie" and not bound to any corporate culture. You are in full control down to the OS but not the hardware so yeah it counts. I once questioned if hosting on VPS was covered under the term self-hosting and got down voted. It was a legit question, as is your question, but I guess people took it as if I was saying that it isn't self-hosting.
yakkomajuri 2y ago
Love to see people thinking about this! You might be interested in some of the ideas here: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-ish.md https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is... Happy to have a chat if you think it makes sense. I dropped the project above a year ago.

bigfatkitten 2y ago

As much as I love the idea, I can't help but see some irony in an index of sites outside the Big Tech walled gardens being hosted on a major walled garden.

dend 2y ago
The beauty of this site is that it's just HTML with minimal styling and JavaScript. If the current walled garden doesn't fit my needs at some point in the future, throwing it on another host takes less than 10 minutes, plus whatever the delay will be from DNS propagation. That's a built-in future resiliency, IMO.
- A1kmm 2y ago
  I think it right to base the assessment of whether it is a walled garden on how easy it is for outsiders to access, and how easy it is to leave and take your community. For viewing, I think you are doing well - your own domain name, which you can host where you like, and which currently doesn't impose many restrictions on who can view without signing up to anything. But part of your community engagement is about having the community submit changes to you. And having that via GitHub is a walled garden - you can't make a PR without a GitHub account - or even search the code. And they say you are only allowed one free account - so one identity only - and I've heard credible reports they actively enforce it by IP matching etc..., and ban people if they suspect them of having two accounts. Moving off GitHub isn't always that easy - you'd need to retrieve all your PRs, but then the problem is people who have GitHub accounts to engage with you would need to migrate their method of engagement. So GitHub is absolutely a walled garden, and if you have a public GitHub, it is part of how you engage with your community. Walled gardens do have the benefit of more people being in them - there is some barrier to entry to signing up on a random Gitea or Forgejo instance - but then you are beholden to the policies of the walled garden.
  - dend 2y ago
    Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.

diegocg 2y ago

Funny how we have gone back to web directories

mikro2nd 2y ago
Webrings are also seeing some revival. Seems that actual curation by actual human beings is better than algorithmic or "AI" slop.
mxuribe 2y ago
I don't know if its only me...but years ago when google was in its early days, i considered google to have authority because of its "completeness", and its unobtrusive experience. For some time now, i have not thought of google in that same, good way. Hence, if i wish to find quality content and good results, i use other mechanisms which have earned my trust and respect...some of those include open directories, web rings, old school type blogrolls, RSS feeds, suggestions from the fediverse, recommendations from family, friends, and colleagues, etc. Do i still use a search engine? Sure! I use DDG (which behind the scenes isn't much better than google since they're dependent on Bing/MS)...but nowadays i diversify my expedition a bunch more when searching for something. Gone are the days where i depend as much on big tech (or at least, try my damn best to minimize my dependence on big tech in as many areas of my on/offline life).

freetonik 2y ago

Very cool! As someone else mentioned already, OPML export would be cool, especially if it’s per category (personal, design/ux, etc.) I also curate a list of blogs as part of my blog discovery/search engine/reader project: https://minifeed.net/blogs https://minifeed.net/blogs

dend 2y ago
Great job on building a delightful experience! I really like the design. For OPML, tracking the enhancement here: https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198 https://github.com/blogscroll/blogscroll/issues/198
nelsonfigueroa 2y ago
I remember discovering minifeed.net not too long ago here on HN. Cool project! I like how you show related posts from other blogs when viewing an item. It's nice for discovering new blogs.
- freetonik 2y ago
  Thanks! I still don't feel ready to do a proper "Show HN" with it though :) The related posts are generated with the help of a vector database (Cloudflare Vectorize [1]). I take post titles and descriptions as input, vectorize and store the results in the vector DB. Then for each post, I find 10-15 related posts and store the results in a separate table (it's a plain one-to-many SQL table). This is done because querying the vector DB is not super fast, and I wanted Minifeed to load under 500ms (according to my status page tracking, users in Europe for some reason experience the fastest loading times of 100-200ms! [2]). I also set up a scheduled job which regularly updates the relations (since there are new posts every day, and some of them may become "related" to existing posts). I've been meaning to write a blog post about the overall architecture of Minifeed, there are lots of small components related to RSS parsing, updates, caching, etc. 1. https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/ 2. https://status.minifeed.net/ https://status.minifeed.net/
  - 2y ago

MrThoughtful 2y ago

Some are examples of good design ideas.

lemming 2y ago

Kagi also has an occasionally delightful small web index: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web. It’s nicely integrated into their search results too.

ajmurmann 2y ago
And of course there is always https://marginalia.nu https://marginalia.nu
- sunaookami 2y ago
  and https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ with a "Surprise" button
  - mxuribe 2y ago
    Thanks for this refresher! For the life of me i recalled that there was a sort of search engine for the smol web, but could not recall its name! Thanks to you for finding it again for me! :-)
rpastuszak 2y ago
In case anyone's interested, I keep a small list of indie sites here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-content/ https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/places-to-find-indie-web-co... Included: gardens, personal websites, zines, and toys.
misfitgentleman 2y ago
You can get RSS feeds of random indie web posts. I’ve found a few good sites this way. https://indieblog.page/rss https://indieblog.page/rss
- mahirsaid 2y ago
  do you mean the RSS feeds you're getting are about new indie sites and domains for them? if so i would like to know some of the RSS feeds your using.

j3s 2y ago

cool, a garden index! love that they included an RSS feed too (https://blogscroll.com/index.xml https://blogscroll.com/index.xml) - i'm sticking that in my feed reader immediately. it sounds nice to have a few random new digital garden sites to peruse once in awhile.

openrisk 2y ago

Cool but this will grow unworkable as the number of entries increases and will require some sort of filtering / searching. Even pure signal can be overwhelming these days when so much good stuff exists. Which brings us to the (as far as I know unsolved) question of supporting large scale discovery of the web without drifting into enshittification. Some sort of decentralized index that will be distributed in a torrent-like manner might work but that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc. Bottom line is that the walled gardens did not exist, they evolved because the original web was missing critical components of usability. They exploited a vacuum. To fill the vacuum with something more benevolent we need to go back and solve these problems. The rest will be history.

dend 2y ago
Yeah, I am still thinking how to evolve this into a useful, yet minimalist design as it grows. I am quite inspired by high-density websites (things that were de-facto in the late 90s), so will have to see how to incorporate that. That being said, the meta-point about at-scale discovery is astute - it's largely unsolved for personal sites/digital gardens. And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck long-term. Will have to think through a solution as more content gets added.
klez 2y ago
> that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc. IMHO that's the beauty of it. Sometimes I want to be hit with everything the web has to offer. But some other times I do want curated lists of links organized by category with opinionated criteria for inclusion.

rednafi 2y ago

Love the idea, but I’m not sure how well it will scale. I’ve seen similar lists before and even went out of my way to include my blog there, only to never find that page again. That said, I’m loving this renewed interest in building our own little corners on the internet. I have mine[1] too. [1]: https://rednafi.com https://rednafi.com

mahirsaid 2y ago
With the current state of the internet today,having control of your digital assets and identity make more sense. i would like to see them more useful and sophisticated but i understand its hard without large capital. It's amazing what some people can create on their own. Leaving your identity to be represented by big tech is turning out to be only in their interests.

mikae1 2y ago

Weird. I love a good link list, but most links I clicked were just regular portfolio websites, not digital gardens in the gardens vs. streams[1] sense. Does the creator not know what a digital garden is? [1] https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-and-ui-popup-indie-web-camp-session-2020 https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-...

dend 2y ago
Fair feedback. In my eyes, I treat any personal site as a digital garden - I am not really sticking to the "pure" definition. If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? I think it is, but that's my own take on it. I intentionally try to avoid sites that are in any shape _not_ personal or otherwise representative of an individual trying to stake their little corner of the internet.
- mikae1 2y ago
  Thanks for replying. :) > If you are putting an effort to curate and grow your own site, is that not a digital garden? That's really stretching the definition IMO. What characterizes a garden is the slow growth and constant pruning — the making of a personal wiki. https://indieweb.org/digital_garden https://indieweb.org/digital_garden and https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history are good intros to gardens. Most of the websites I visited seemed to be and forget sites targeted at potential employers.
  - dend 2y ago
    I amended the description to better reflect the work. Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate the pointers to the IndieWeb and Maggie's sites.
  - wink 2y ago
    I dunno, sounds more like some gate keeping, or maybe I'm biased because I hate the term for no discernible reason. > has content of different levels of development, is imperfect and often a playground for experimentation, learning, revising, iteration, and growth for diverse content So because I polish my "posts" to a certain degree before publishing it's not a digital garden? Because 50% of my blog posts are "timeless" in a sense that they're about... stuff that exists.. not current dvelopments it's not a digital garden? Becuase I never delete stuff (as if people with wikis would delete stuff :P)... and so on. I mean, I couldn't care less but I feel (and this seems to be a common theme) that the indieweb people are mostly dogmatic about their definitions and not very encouraging (also why I tried to take part in the irc channel years ago and left, frustrated). But yeah, if someone want to own the definition of blog and digital garden and not accepting a certain overlap with "personal website", sure.

nomemory 2y ago

Not a garden but I also curtate links that I find interesting here: https://www.andreinc.net/links/ https://www.andreinc.net/links/ And maintain an active blogroll with blogs I follow: https://www.andreinc.net/blogroll https://www.andreinc.net/blogroll

BaudouinVH 2y ago

How outside the "Big Tech" gardens is blogging on Github ? https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-github/ https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-acquires-g... My definition of property is more restricted : either having hosting somewhere as independent as possible or self-hosting on Raspberry Pi e.g. My two cents

vedranm 2y ago
I have a website [1] on GitHub Pages. It's extremely easy to move out of GitHub, since it is on a domain I control, which is not the case with e.g. social profiles. That fact that the site is static makes it really easy to host it basically anywhere where a web server exists. The site is deployed using a GitHub Actions workflow, which happens to be the only GitHub-specific feature, but a similar script could easily be written in the future for another hosting if necessary. [1] https://group.miletic.net/ https://group.miletic.net/

vouaobrasil 2y ago

These days, I prefer smaller websites more and more. But I do like Substack because they are sort of like a personal website, since there are very few social features and generally you can just visit one person's Substack without seeing ANY content from anywhere else.

khafra 2y ago

When reading the title I thought of "walled gardens," as in collaborative sites with heavy moderation/curation, but a lot of these seem to be just personal sites with careful attention to aesthetics, function, and content. And how can I trust any list like that which doesn't include gwern.net?

nilsherzig 2y ago
A walled garden usually refers to a nice to use software ecosystem (the garden) with the twist that it stops users from escaping / communicating with the outside (the wall). Apple products tend to be the example for that. The title properly refers to the fact that these sites aren't hosted on substack / medium / some other pre build environment.

prmoustache 2y ago

Bring back the webrings!

Emigre_ 2y ago

Really nice, but you could consider to move away from Big Tech altogether; there are alternatives to GitHub.

flpm 2y ago

The Internet has a big discoverability problem now that search has a big advertising conflict of interests. The only way to find web "human" content is to rely on the curation of other humans. Funny enough mining those links is what made Google the giant it is now. But this time around we will not be fooled by the next "don't be evil" tech giant :D

yakkomajuri 2y ago
I already posted a top-level comment about this but I tried to tackle this specific problem when I built Recess (https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess) which might interest you. Never got any traction so I dropped it. The idea was to be a content aggregator for what I called "siloed content" (personal websites, blogs, etc). The ideas are outlined here if anyone's keen: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-ish.md https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is... I'm happy for someone to take this over too even if they're interested. It's MIT-licensed.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

deafpolygon 2y ago

Isn't GitHub a "Big Tech" walled garden?

scarface_74 2y ago
Anyone can view and download content from it and transferring content to another site involves three commands “git pull …”, “git remote set-url origin…”, and “git push”.

yakkomajuri 2y ago

I've thought about this problem before and built Recess as one way to approach this and related "issues". It never got traction so I dropped it but someone might be interested in the ideas behind it: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess

sylware 2y ago

"walled" is too nice for what Big Tech is actually doing. What they are doing is literaly digital jails "for you own security........"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

clircle 2y ago

Yeah but can any of them write well?