Hubzilla as a digital garden
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The whole purpose of using hubzilla, rather than other Zot flavors, is to do interesting things with the web, and to use tools like wikis and webpages. That's what I'm trying to do again now.
I get terribly embarrassed and confused by the mix of public and private on the web. That happened most recently when I was moving a bunch of posts around and these got shifted by a bot I'd set up on Mastodon into a public timeline. I think that public timelines are one of the most problematic aspects of the fediverse and prone to problematic situations or behavior. Maybe even Twitter is better in that respect, as it lacks a public timeline.
Because I keep Hubzilla on a home server where I'm the sole user, there is less of a worry about the public timeline, but I still feel like I want to have some control over the visibility of posts. I tend to write long posts and there are a several good reasons not to send these into the timelines even of "friends". I don't want them in the search engines either, because they simply float around on the web for years. In the meantime I will probably change my opinion on many things.
My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.
(
Gandhi)
My solution for blogging is to use Hubzilla's Articles and make these available only to friends. Articles don't go into the Hubzilla stream or timeline and don't get into search engines due to the sign-in.
But Articles still accumulate in the reverse-chronological order of blog posts, and are therefore not perfect for every use. If we want to build a body of knowledge around a certain subject, Hubzilla has better tools, such as wikis and web pages. I have just been reading about the "
digital garden" concept and I really like the ideas there. Rather than writing posts that sink down like sediment into the archives of a blog, it seems to me better to add incrementally to some of the subjects that I would write about. If I later change my opinion about something, or reach a different understanding, it is easy to edit what I have written, which means that I can feel more comfortable about sharing on the open web.
That's the way I'm going to be using Hubzilla from now on. I list the various elements that I use and the topics that I will be writing about on my profile page, though it would be better if I could find a way of creating a custom menu that would appear on every page.
I'm still likely to goof and mess up occasionally, and put content in the wrong category or under the wrong privacy setting. That's a danger whenever we use the web. But I'll try my best to get things right and not put any unwelcome material into anybody's stream, while writing as well as I can about the subjects that matter to me.