Why use a digital garden?
I have a lot of thoughts, a lot of projects, and ideas. Enough to write blogs for the next decade. However, I have failed to promote my personal brand and market myself in any kind of SEO optimized way. My main goal with digital gardening is to share more of my portfolio of work, get feedback, and think more deeply, but without the pressure to perfectly finetune each thought on the first try. Putting your thoughts out there means you naturally refine them into something more coherent than when you are just thinking privately but the steps from private thought to public work can be aided by an intermediate stage, a public-private thought canvas.
Digital gardens build on the ideas of commonplace books, zettelkasten, PKM, and hyperlinking, allowing thoughts to evolve slowly, bottom up, linking ideas into something unique and special. Sharing some of these is a low-risk way to start a daily practice of writing. These thoughts evolve into articles, books, videos, and more with time. The point is that the process happens iteratively in small steps to make progress on ideas and see if there is interest in the pursuit, first from yourself and then from others. You can decide for yourself what you keep private and what is public, and you can get a sense of how you feel about making something public before committing to a larger release.
These notes have the added advantage of being a textbook of what you have learned, raw; there's no need to beautifully illustrate every project or be entertaining at every step. There's no pressure to dive deep, but you still can establish yourself as an expert bit by bit and demonstrate your projects, skills, and experiments in public, get feedback, and learn.