writefreely garden

this note describes how to use a writefreely multi-user instance as a digital garden, as well as its pros and cons. 

basics:

• create a super user
• shut down registration
• set max_blogs to a large number (not sure if 0 stands for infinite, will check later)
• create blogs for different topics (see: blog chain)
• use tags for horizontal organization (e.g. general topics)
• the local timeline (“reader”) will be the weblog interface, organized in chronological order (the “stream” part)
• mention other topics using their handles
• customize css and landing page as you would with other sites

advanced:

• the public garden (the park?): all the public blogs/topics that show up on the timeline
• the unlisted garden: not accessible via timeline, but traceable by entering keywords
• the anonymous garden:
  • use anonymous posts for improvised/wip topics, then move them into a new blog
  • anonymous posts are visible, but they have unique hashes, thus making them sort of “hidden”
  • anonymous posts are almost undiscoverable, until you explicitly link to them from somewhere
  • i found this very handy when i needed to share a piece of wip research with my friends
• collaboration: just send out invitation links to people
  • however, this will be a “partial collab” because they won't be able to change your content
  • however, however, this is not a wiki system anyway

pros:

• each blog chain has its own handle in the fediverse (may also be a con!)
• easy content management
• seamless writing with markdown
• no deploys! no compilations! anymore
• export content to json or plain text anytime anywhere
• mobile friendly (and yes, i actually write posts on mobile devices)

cons:

• needs a server
• no full-text search (yet, but the site can be indexed by a search engine)