A malleable garden

What could you plant in a malleable garden? By malleable garden I mean: malleable software x digital garden.

Malleable software means well-crafted apps that end users can fully customize and own. It’s what Bonnie Nardi was dreaming about in the 90s. Digital gardens are blogs that you organize however you wish, without the expectation that your work must be “finished”. This site is a digital garden.

So I imagine a malleable garden as a place where anyone—coding allowed but not required—can plant their own digital garden. Like, a metaphorical Lowe’s Garden Center for personal websites.

An incomplete malleable garden

During my initial ideaphoria phase I bought malleable.garden (I have a domain-buying problem). My small aim for this is to experiment with some features that an incomplete malleable garden might include.

The user archetype I have in mind is my brother. He’s an English teacher and casual musician. He doesn’t code, but he does write, and he’s interested in tending to his own digital garden (true story). Maybe I can build malleable.garden for an audience of one—my brother—as an experiment.

A full attempt at a truly malleable garden would be really, really hard. There are seven principles of malleable software and six patterns of digital gardening to marry.

A malleable garden of eden

The ideal malleable garden—the malleable garden of eden—would adhere to all seven malleable software principles and all six digital garden patterns. This essay is a seedling, so I have some more thinking to do here. I don’t cover all 13 principles/patterns.

The seven principles of malleable software (A)

• Easy to change
• Arbitrary recombination and reuse
• Open-ended potential
• Retain ownership and control
• Freely sharable
• Modifying in the context of use
• Thoughtfully crafted

The six patterns of digital gardening (B)

• Topography over timelines
• Continuous growth
• Imperfection & Learning in public
• Playful, personal, and experimental
• Intercropping & Content diversity
• Independent ownership

Easy to change (A1) x Continuous growth (B2)

A malleable garden that is easy to change and continuously grows means you should be able to have an idea (“oo, I want a /bookshelf page!”), plant it, hit save, and send a link to a friend in like 5 minutes.

It should be easy, even trivial, to edit your digital garden.

Open-ended potential (A3) x Playful, personal, and experimental (B4)

The open-ended potential of malleable software is inherent in digital gardens. But a traditional digital garden is malleable only because it is built by one person (who can code). The ideal malleable garden could be endlessly and experimentally personalized by anyone.

Retain ownership and control (A4) x Independent ownership (B6)

These two are almost the same exact principle/pattern. For starters, gardens propagated from an ideal malleable garden need the option for custom domains—that’s table stakes. A gardener should also be able to write and store drafts wherever they want: Apple Notes, a Google doc, Notion, a .txt file, etc.

Maybe each garden’s code should not be bundled, and it should be exportable in a single click. So maybe that would mean downloading some HTML, CSS, and markdown. The friction between simplicity and full customization would be super hard to reconcile.

Freely shareable (A5) x Imperfection & Learning in public (B3)

A malleable garden should be freely shareable and encourage learning in public (or at least make it easy to do so). Building a malleable garden on top of the Web lends itself nicely to sharing with URLs. There should be a tight loop of edit-save-share.

What’s already out there

Part way into writing this I felt a little silly because, like, is “malleable garden” just a dressed up way of saying website builder?

The ideal malleable garden I have in mind would be approachable like a no-code website builder, but customizable without limitation. It wouldn’t have hard constraints, but it might nudge you toward digital gardening practices like bi-directional links or custom organization and growth stages.

It should be easy enough for a gardener to share something with the world within an hour or so, but advanced enough to build a palatial garden over time.

mmm.page

Also part way into writing this, I ran into a project on Twitter that is very much on theme: mmm.page. It is really cool. I was actually shocked at how much overlap there is with what I’d started jotting down.

Its creator, XH, wrote up a succinct vision in: An Internet Canvas. They also have a newsletter called Woolgather. I liked this quotation from the first issue:

And maybe, if I’m lucky, some of my projects and writing might make software seem more approachable, and yet still powerful and creative and exciting – the “kind of work that suggests freedom and possibility." [emphasis mine]

Notion

Notion is wonderful, yet constrained (in some cases constraints are good). It is Maggie Appleton’s primary recommendation for non-technical folks interested in digital gardening.

They also recently released Notion Sites, which they are billing as “the easiest way to get a website up and running”. You know a Notion page when you see one, and so even with a custom domain it might not feel like it’s fully yours.

Val Town

Val Town fits into the malleable software ethos, and it’s fantastic for digital gardeners who can code. I used Val Town to create a custom email system for my digital garden clippings (newsletter).

They are building toward a vision of end-programmer programming. It doesn’t perfectly match the malleable garden ideal because it is only for a technical crowd, but it’s a major step in that direction.

Website builders

And of course, there are many website builders out there: Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Bubble, etc. I hesitate to include these because I don’t have personal experience with them and their purpose is much broader than digital gardens. But—I'm contradicting myself a little to suggest there would be a limit to the breadth of a malleable garden. So maybe I'm just describing another website builder...