There’s a abandoned flower bed behind my apartment building. Nobody planted it this year. Nobody weeded it either. It’s just… doing its own thing now — dandelions and clover and some aggressive mint that’s staging a slow takeover of the whole plot.

I think about that flower bed a lot when I’m working on this website.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Care About Your Tomatoes

We live in a small number of very large gardens now. Instagram’s garden. TikTok’s garden. X’s garden. They’re beautiful in their way — immaculately curated, algorithmically optimized, designed by teams of people whose entire job is to keep you scrolling.

And I get it. I really do. There’s something incredibly satisfying about posting a photo and watching the likes roll in. The dopamine hit is real. The reach is real. You can go from zero to a million eyes on your work in an afternoon.

But here’s what nobody talks about: you don’t own any of it.

You don’t own the algorithm that decides who sees your post. You don’t own the platform that could change its rules tomorrow. You don’t own the aesthetic that makes your content feel at home there. You’re a tenant in someone else’s garden, and the rent keeps going up.

What’s a Digital Garden?

The term “digital garden” has been floating around the internet for a few years, and it means slightly different things to different people. For me, it’s simple:

A digital garden is a collection of thoughts, ideas, and creative work that you grow slowly, on your own land, at your own pace — without an algorithm deciding who gets to see it.

It’s a website you control. It might be static. It might be dynamic. It might be a blog, a wiki, a collection of half-finished notes, or a gallery of projects that may never be done. That’s the point.

A digital garden doesn’t demand perfection. It doesn’t punish you for posting on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday. It doesn’t bury your three-month-old content because the algorithm decided it’s stale. It just… exists. Like that flower bed behind my apartment.

Why I’d Rather Plant Than Post

I’ve been publishing on jerithai.com regularly now, and the experience is fundamentally different from posting on social media.

When I write here, I’m not optimizing for engagement. I’m not gaming a recommendation system. I’m not trying to go viral. I’m just… putting something into the world and seeing what happens.

Sometimes a post gets a lot of attention. Sometimes it gets none. And that’s okay. Because this space is mine. I own the domain. I control the design. I decide what stays and what goes. If WordPress明天 decides to change something, I can move the whole thing to a static site generator in an afternoon. The content is portable. The identity is mine.

That’s not true anywhere else online.

The Slow Web

There’s a movement called the “Slow Web” — it’s the idea that not everything needs to be instant, viral, and ephemeral. Some things are meant to grow slowly. Some ideas need time to compost before they’re ready.

RSS is part of this. Email newsletters are part of this. Personal websites, digital gardens, and independently hosted blogs are part of this.

These aren’t the flashy parts of the internet. You won’t find them trending. But they’re where the interesting stuff lives — the weird, the personal, the deeply considered, the gloriously unfinished.

How to Start Your Own (It’s Easier Than You Think)

If this resonates with you, here’s my unsolicited advice for starting a digital garden:

1. Start stupidly small. A single HTML file on a $5/month VPS is a digital garden. A GitHub Pages site with Markdown files is a digital garden. You don’t need a CMS, a design system, or a content strategy. You need a place to put words.
2. Plant things, don’t perform things. Write for yourself first. If it helps someone else, great. If not, you still grew something.
3. Let it be messy. Half-finished posts are fine. Weird categories are fine. Typos are fine. Perfection is the enemy of a garden.
4. Use RSS. Set up an RSS feed for your garden, and subscribe to other people’s feeds. Rebuild the human internet, one subscription at a time.
5. Don’t worry about traffic. For the first year, maybe nobody will read it. That’s fine. Gardens take time. The best ones were planted by people who weren’t looking for an audience.

What I’m Growing Here

This site has become my digital garden — a place where I grow tutorials alongside poetry, tech essays alongside cyberpunk fiction. Some posts are polished. Some are half-baked. Some will resonate. Some will sit here quietly, like perennials that come back every year whether anyone notices or not.

I like it that way.

In a world that moves fast and breaks things, there’s something radical about tending a small corner of the internet slowly. About writing words that might not be read for months or years. About building something you own, byte by byte, post by post, season by season.

The dandelions in that abandoned flower bed? They’re thriving. Nobody planted them. Nobody tends them. They just found a little patch of dirt and decided to grow.

I think we could all learn something from the dandelions.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a website to water.