Miscellanea no 3: About walled gardens, digital gardens and the Web

Edition no 3 Date 20 February 2026
If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. You can sign up here.

These days I’m thinking about the web. About how fragmented and closed it is. From something that started as a decentralised way to connect people and ideas, it became a myriad of closed spaces, of walled gardens.

I think there are people who want a freer, more human-oriented digital web, without corporate overlords to monitor and censor every byte of data.

You can find a good history of the World Wide Web here.

To better understand where we are, let’s look at some definitions:

Indie web is a collective of people building their digital presence on their own infrastructure, rather than on centralised social media platforms. This gives the user control over their data, offers longevity, and the user can control the reader’s experience. The indie web has principles, technical formats, and events. More here.

POSSE, which is an abbreviation of Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, is the practice of posting on your site and then sharing or linking to other platforms. The idea is to have your website as the main Source of Truth, and use social media sites, aggregators, and newsletters as disseminators of the original.

A walled garden or closed ecosystem is a term that refers to a closed environment that restricts access to a range of applications, systems, audiences, or data. It is used by marketing professionals and technology people.

I’ve written about walled gardens and POSSE here.

A digital garden is a website or wiki where the user collects, edits, and distils pieces of information. It’s a less polished, more “work in progress” version of a personal blog. The growth of note-taking apps like Roam Research or Obsidian has given a boost to the idea.

Here is a great history of the Digital Garden concept.

This essay, written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush it is considered a visionary piece in the area of information technology and knowledge management.

A paper from 2005 describes it as:

“Bush's paper might be regarded as describing a microcosm of the information society, with the boundaries tightly drawn by the interests and experiences of a major scientist of the time, rather than the more open knowledge spaces of the 21st century. Bush provides a core vision of the importance of information to industrial/scientific society, using the image of an "information explosion" arising from the unprecedented demands on scientific production and technological application of World War II. He outlines a version of information science as a key discipline within the practice of scientific and technical knowledge domains. His view encompasses the problems of information overload and the need to devise efficient mechanisms to control and channel information for use”.

You can find the original essay published in The Atlantic here.

Until next time.

PS: The image is a painting by the French artist Sébastien Bourdon called “A Classical Landscape”. It’s an oil on canvas, probably dated around the 1660s, on display at the Met Museum.