Mentalogue 1 - Digital Gardening, Slow Social Media & Intro
2024 is been a year of experimentation. I started my journey creating content online, starting with my podcast Invisible Algorithms, posting consistently on my LinkedIn profile, and finally starting the Letters From The Build Zone newsletter. It's been a lot of work, and even if I enjoyed the process and the results I got, I don't think I found my place on the web, yet.
Social media could be a great place to meet people, get inspired and getting feedback on your crazy ideas. As my fellow product engineer Luís Soares told me a few days ago "socials can become a den for salesmen, an echo chamber for sellers, even if no one wants to hear them but they steal the spotlight".
I couldn't agree more.
Realisations
I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn in 2024. I met some incredible people, wrote tons of content and got a job through one of my latest connections. I didn't have anything to sell (or was I selling ideas?), but I'm not that innocent either.
I started writing in a certain way to get engagement and reactions. I've been controversial, expressed strong opinions and spent days writing and scheduling my posts, thinking what could work best, looking at analytics and repurposing old content that “performed well”. All for the sake of making the algorithm happy, reach more people and grow my audience.
Something was off. Every interaction started to suck all my energy, and leaving me drained, anxious and even a bit angry.
Two weeks ago I decided to just stop using it as an experiment, and after the first few days of FOMO, I started to feel way better. I felt more positive and optimistic overall. I got back to read more and work on some side projects again. LinkedIn was taking too much of my time, and mind space.
At the same time, I deeply believe that ideas and projects can’t exist in a vacuum. That’s why I don’t like to post to the void, I like people to engage with my content and giving me feedback (hopefully the constructive one).
Isn’t that why the web was born in the first place, to share knowledge across the world?
That’s what brought me to look for an alternative. I initially thought to build my own platform, and when I brainstormed the idea with my AI assistant, it told me: well, you want to build a digital garden… And that’s how it started. Following that I read A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, by Maggie Appleton , and I spent days in this new rabbit hole.
Digital gardens, streams and campfires
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes (or anything really) are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time.
A stream is what we’re all used to: blogs, tweets, LinkedIn posts, anything resembling a feed in reverse chronological order. Compared to gardens, streams are more like thinking out loud in a stream of consciousness. By design the content lacks context, making it usually difficult to engage with properly, and that leaves it open to any kind of interpretation.
A campfire is a virtual community that bring people together around specific topics, and help build deeper relationships and safe spaces where members can discuss, seek help and grow together. You'll usually find them on platforms such as Slack, Discord, Circle and so on.
In my opinion the trick is to find a good balance between the 3, find the right platform for your purposes and try to integrate gardens, streams and campfires.
Slow Social Media
I think there isn't a black and white answer here (as always, it depends). The starting point for me was understanding that I’m not really interested in “personal branding” or “finding a niche”, something that social media like LinkedIn and X encourage you to do with hyper specialised bios, banners and content.
I just want to be myself, Peppe, with my multitude of interests. Most platforms for content creators, put you in the position to focus on one thing, one main topic, one way of communicating: audio, video or the written word.
I also don’t care about publishing consistently, on a schedule. First because that stresses me out, and most importantly because I need time to think through things, and I don’t want to rush it for the sake of being active on social media.
Shall we call that, Slow Social Media?
Will that give me less relevance? Fair enough, people will find me one way or the other if it’s meant to be :)
What's next?
In the digital gardening style, I’ve started gathering some notes on Digital Gardening.
My garden will contain my notes, which are mostly written for myself and I'll use the space to organise my own concepts and ideas in a more public setting where I can link together notes on various topics. It's an interesting experiment!
Be aware that the notes will be works-in-progress and constantly being updated, so if a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you.
For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point.
You can get started here: https://peppesilletti.io
Welcome again, and remember to “not trample on the flowerbeds” 🪴
If you'd like to get in touch with me email, bluesky and linkedin are your best channels.