It's called a digital garden
I wrote two articles about two sides of how I view the purpose and function of this website: I said it was not a blog while also acknowledging it is a blog. It turns out there’s a term for what I was trying to articulate: the digital garden.
Some people have written about the shortcomings of the blog format in much less restrained terms than I did, arguing the blog broke the Web and that ‘Chronologically sorted pages of posts aren’t how people actually use the internet’.
Among those looking for a different model, a common concern is how blogging makes writing on the Web performative. Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden goes into this. For a variety of reasons, blogs became more polished and professional and there started to be the feeling that we had to produce perfect, finished content just like the corporate blogs. It’s a kind of publishing paranoia/writer’s block/impostor syndrome that I have definitely suffered from.
DRAFT: more concerned with findability than performativity
The aspect which concerns me here, though, isn’t so much the anxiety of having to produce polished results, as the inability to find things and organise them in an effective way. The chronological feed is what drowns out the more meaningful content. As Tom Critchlow cites Robin Sloan: ‘flow is the feed … Stock is the durable stuff … that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today … it’s what people discover via search’.
This is what draws me to the concept of a digital garden. The idea of having content that grows and expands over time, rather than a never-ending stream in which interesting stuff gets lost as it gets pushed down and off the front page. An article which articulates this intention/model is Matthew Graybosch’s Grimoire.
By the way, take a wider look at that site. How it works isn’t entirely obvious at first, because the page table of contents isn’t at the top, but a bit lower down the left sidebar (and on mobile it breaks entirely :( ). But once you know how it works, it’s an intriguing example of information that is findable and grouped by the author’s intent rather than by the dictates of chronology.