Welcome to my digital garden (https://indieweb.org/digital_garden)!
A “digital garden” might look like another name for a personal website but it really isn’t. Not only is it much much less complicated to make and operate with a much lower barrier to entry into digital publishing, it’s also got rules. Well, a rule.
Some people might disagree but I believe having rules and limitations to what a digital garden is and isn’t might help a lot.
This garden #
Here I discuss other people’s as well as my own ideas, concepts, and hobby projects - primarily software projects (and some a bit more tangible) - that I’m thinking about or am actively working on.
Some are FOSS, some proprietary, some might make sense some might not. What’s important is - I want to share these ideas publicly and build at least some of them publicly.
And before you ask, the reason I have to pursuit so many different ideas at once is, one, this helps me explore various ways things can be done and practice idea cross-pollination, two, most people won’t care for most of these ideas but eventually a lot of people will definitely care a lot about one particular idea.
If you want to get involved in anything or just have a question/comment, find me here
I’m hoping to at least advocate for (or lead/support) the realization of some of these ideas and I do have capacity & a proven way to work on all of them one at a time (more on this later).
PYTHON MEETUP SPEAKERS WANTED: I co-organize Python Belgrade meetups and we’re always looking for speakers, in person or telespeakers, if you’re interested either contact me or mailto:cfp@pythonbelgrade.com
Software #
To start off, there’s microads (name is wip), which is a barebones ad platform intended to help get indie projects off the ground (in terms of marketing).
Had this idea while I was building cardcraft (name also WIP) a game engine intended for (collectible/trading) card game designers and it has this option to put some money in a pot (if you want) before the match starts and whoever wins takes the money. This implies that the developer can invest money into the project by playing against people and putting some money as a stake - whoever beats the dev takes the money. Kind of a reverse play2earn for bootstrapped multiplayer games.
Another form of this concept would be if you start a software project and you join a distributed ad platform by starting the platform’s ad delivery node on your compute/machine(s) and if you serve an ad that someone else has funded you get paid but you also get to serve your own ad for free - and it actually ends up shown somewhere. There’s more to it but that’s the gist.
Going to back to the card game project, there’s buoy a skill sharing platform, started as a hackathon project, same as cardcraft - and it too is connected to cardcraft. The idea is that I’d want to learn to draw/write/compose etc and just make game art in general in order to make a demo for cardcraft. That’s what buoy is for.
I did not get any interest for the card game engine itself however the concept can be expanded to cover a lot of different types of games so I will be looking into turning “cardcraft” into a multiplayer game server framework and open sourcing the secret sauce part which makes or breaks these kinds of systems.
Web #
I’m really interested in internet publishing and discoverability and I’m noting down www things relating to markweb/kyuweb/web1.1(reinventingtheweb.com), because I think
- the web deserves more experimentation
- the web needs to be much more beginner friendly
Towards the two goals above I’m experimenting with the world wide web positioning system as an alternative to search engines and idea there is that people should be able to find your stuff if your stuff is online. This is definitely not the case at the time of writing and it’s effectively an unsolved problem.
On the www page you’ll will find a series of very minimalistic (like 50 LOC or so) HTML & CSS templates that an absolute beginner can just copy and toy with, get their own webpage up in a matter of minutes.
Additionally markdowncities is supposed to make it easy for people to get started with web publishing. Want to write “hello world” in a markdown (index.md) file and it’s instantly a live website? Markdowncities is one solution for that.
Network effects and rent seeking in digital markets #
While on the subject of approachable and simple FOSS in the space, an idea I’ve been brewing recently is a minimal FOSS 2sided marketplace (name is WIP) a job/classifieds/other board.
Another dysfunctional part of WWW is the excessive reliance on social network platforms, the invetiable walled gardens they become, and algorithmic abuse of their own users. Much has been said about this and various approaches have been proposed and I’d like to propose another.
Not software, strictly speaking #
You can catch my language learning with transcription livestreams at https://www.youtube.com/@oazesnova or help me figure out how to start a meetup with only an idea.
Tangible pursuits #
Some will probably relate - when you work as a software developer for long enough and especially if you pour a lot of effort to continually improve, you start losing on presence and even time to frequently interact with more tangible things. I’m interested in exploring ways to gradually balance this out past the usual things people are already doing, as I’m not sure it really works that well.
One potential venue is commerce as a hobby
Slashpages #
Slashpages (see https://slashpages.net/) are universally agreed upon common (and usually self explanatory) root-level pages people add to their sites.
Currently present
Interactions #
A concept I’d like to explore here is interacting with other websites by way of open letters. So instead of relying on comment systems, one could write open letters about things they link to, with pure web 1.0 concepts only.