A digital garden is a loose collection of hyperlinked notes — personal, or scoped to a project — that you maintain over long periods of time, the way you might tend a garden over the years. Unlike a blog, which presents finished posts in reverse-chronological order, a digital garden is never done. Notes link to other notes, ideas evolve, and the collection grows denser and more useful with every addition.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/flancian/garden/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
How a digital garden differs from a blog or wiki
Blogs and digital gardens are both personal publishing formats, but they serve different purposes:- A blog publishes polished, timestamped posts. The value is in individual pieces. Discovery happens through feeds and search engines pointing readers to specific articles.
- A wiki is usually collaborative and encyclopaedic. It aims for completeness and neutral tone.
- A digital garden is personal and exploratory. Notes can be rough, half-formed, or highly specific. The value is not in any single note but in the network of connections between notes.
Flancian’s garden contains thousands of notes in this style, maintained since the early 2020s. The note you’re reading right now is itself derived from a node in that garden.
Why gardens compound in value
Digital gardens benefit from compounding effects: the longer you maintain one and the more notes you add, the more useful the whole becomes. This happens because a significant portion of the value in a garden is not in the individual nodes but in the networking — the relationships between concepts, events, and pieces of information that build up over time. A useful way to think about it: each new note doesn’t just add one unit of value. It potentially creates connections to every other note it links to or shares a topic with. As the garden grows, the number of possible connections grows superlinearly with the number of nodes.The Agora as a multi-garden aggregator
A single digital garden belongs to one person. The Agora extends this idea by aggregating many gardens into a shared knowledge graph. When multiple people write notes on the same topic — using the same[[wikilink]] to name it — the Agora assembles those notes side by side at a single URL.
This creates a networking effect that operates at the level of communities rather than individuals. Your note on, say, [[commons]] is shown alongside every other Agora contributor’s note on the same topic, without either of you having to coordinate.
The reference Agora is at anagora.org. Anyone can browse it without an account. To contribute your own garden, see the joining the Agora guide.
Getting started with your own garden
You don’t need special software to start a digital garden. Any plain-text editor and a folder of Markdown files will do. The main practices that make a garden valuable over time are:- Write consistently — even short, rough notes are worth keeping.
- Link liberally — use
[[wikilinks]]or regular Markdown links to connect related ideas. - Revise over time — return to old notes and update them as your thinking changes.
- Publish openly — sharing your garden allows others to learn from it and link to it.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to publish my garden to get value from it?
Do I need to publish my garden to get value from it?
No. A private garden is still useful for personal knowledge management. Publishing it — and especially connecting it to the Agora — multiplies its value by making it linkable and searchable by others, and by surfacing connections between your notes and theirs.
What format should my notes be in?
What format should my notes be in?
Plain Markdown (
.md) is the most portable format and the one best supported by the Agora. Many gardeners use a specific editor like Obsidian or Logseq that adds features on top of plain Markdown, but the underlying files remain portable text.How is a digital garden different from a personal website?
How is a digital garden different from a personal website?
A personal website typically has a fixed structure — a homepage, an about page, maybe a blog. A digital garden is more like a continuously evolving map of your thinking. It has entry points but no fixed structure, and it’s expected to be incomplete and evolving at any given moment.
What are wikilinks?
What are wikilinks?
Wikilinks are a shorthand link syntax:
[[topic name]]. They let you link to another note by name without knowing its exact file path. If a note for that topic doesn’t exist yet, the link is still valid — it becomes a placeholder for future writing. The Agora uses wikilinks as the primary way to connect notes across different people’s gardens.Can I contribute to the Agora without a digital garden?
Can I contribute to the Agora without a digital garden?
Yes. The Agora also accepts contributions via social media through the Agora bridge project. You can follow the Agora bot on Mastodon (
@agora@botsin.space) and contribute notes directly from social media posts.