(2024-04-10) Erlend Evergreen Content Gardens

Erlend Sogge Heggen: Evergreen content gardens. A year ago in Feed Overload I wrote: 99% of all microblog (and chat) content is ephemeral by design, meant for a specific moment in time. But the 1% that should endure past the 24hr cycle doesn't have good ways to do so in the current paradigm. (2023-03-27-ErlendFeedOverload)

Reddit/Lemmy has a simple Top sorting mechanism for viewing highly rated content in the past Day / Week / Month / Year / All Time

The same could be done for hashtags on the fediverse.

I explored some tangents along that trail in Follow Anyone and Sense-making on the fediverse. Today I’m continuing down this path, refocusing on the notion of content gardens, spurred on by two new developments.

First, a new type of links-curation app was announced: Introducing linkblocks, the Federated Bookmark Manager.

Then yesterday a developer (Evan Boehs) I follow on the fediverse mused about a knowledge-sharing app in the same vein: want a RSS reader (like miniflux; feedly) and a bookmark manager (like pinboard; pocket) with tight integration.

I’m particularly interested in the Pinboard-like experience. Prior to all of the all of my blog posts linked above, I wrote an experimental piece called Netizenship from first principles wherein I try to imagine a safe on-ramp to the internet for my 7yr old nephew.

trio of magical applications that I still consider to be a great foundation for sense-making on the web:

• an ID card you can never lose
• bottomless Bag of Knowledge,
• a telepathic Study Group

For my purposes, Weird will cover the 🪪ID card and Omnivore already covers the 👜Bag of Knowledge. The missing piece is the 🌐Study Group, and that’s where Linkblocks comes in.

what I’ll be talking about here is how I personally imagine and want a web application like Linkblocks to behave.

The social bookmarking app archetype has been around for decades

Reddit, like its forebearer Digg, was a subsequent iteration on the links-aggregator concept, but with one crucial difference: Rather than leaning into the timelessness of social bookmarking, the Reddits and Diggs of the world were social news websites, which are different beasts entirely.

Pinboard’s quiet indie success has been in the timeless, the evergreen nature of content without an expiration date... Commenting is also entirely optional in the links garden, instead endorsing a digital form of parallel play.

What all of these apps do have in common is the function of a links aggregator.

Reading vs sharing

Having talked about the different types of link aggregators, let's now draw a line between the two categories of read-it-later apps, also commonly known as bookmark managers.

As I see it, the difference lies between applications for reading and sharing. A secondary separator can be gleaned between private vs public

Omnivore, Wallabag, Shiori, Linkwarden: Optimizes for the reading experience

Pinboard, Linkblocks, Linkding: Primarily enables a sharing experience

For the latter bunch... their capability for public sharing puts them in a distinctly different category than the former bunch

Communal links gardening

Here’s a live example of Linkding as a public listing of links on someone’s personal webpage.

A narrow focus on the public exchange of links lends itself well to a series of other novel features, like collections

I’d like the ability to create curated lists of roughly the same kind as what you’ll find on IMDB:

One way to do it would be to allow lists based on tag combinations

Automated collections

I run two chat spaces for my Spicy Lobster and Commune projects. Both of these spaces have accumulated hundreds of links at this point.

New paradigm

Things like Bookwyrm are cool, but it’s not what I want. I just wanna link the thing. Books, films, podcasts, articles, songs.., they’re all just resource recommendations which can be encapsulated by links. Good Stuff, as Linkblock’s Rafael puts it.

I don’t wanna write reviews and rate with stars. I hardly even wanna do a search. I just wanna know who else in my network is interested in the same stuff, and have new stuff recommended to me that way.