When we think about social media strategies we usually see them as a way to make our posts look perfect like a neat lawn. We try to make each post Right so that it gets a lot of attention.. There is another way to do things called digital gardening. This way is a bit wilder. It helps us build a good reputation that lasts. Digital gardening is a sustainable way to do social media it is not just about making posts that everyone likes it is about building lasting authority, with social media.(Digital Gardening and Digital Landscaping)

Digital Landscaping Defined

Digital landscaping is a lot like the landscaping you see outside. It is about making things look perfect and nice. People put a lot of work into making sure everything is just right.

Brands make nice posts and videos that they want people to see and like right away. They often use tools to make these posts and they try out different versions to see which one people like better. They want to make sure people see their landscaping and think it is great. Digital landscaping is, about making a good impression.

This way of doing things cares more about how it looks than how good it’s. The stuff that is posted is usually, about what’s popular right now and every single post is made to get likes and shares and to make the system happy. When we measure how well we are doing we look at things that happen quickly like how many people see our posts and how many people do what we want them to do.

Lawns need to be taken care of all the time. If you do not update the content on your lawn it will not be interesting to people for long. The thing is, lawns require upkeep. If the people who make the rules for the internet change one thing it can make it so that nobody sees your lawn. One change, in the algorithm can kill the visibility of lawns. Lawns really need constant upkeep to be seen by people.

Digital Gardening Defined

It is basically the process of gardening. Digital gardening is when you take care of your life like your computer and your phone and make sure everything is organized and easy to find. Digital gardening is also about making your digital life pretty and fun to use. You do gardening by getting rid of old files and updating your software and making sure your digital things are safe. Digital gardening is like gardening in a garden but instead of plants you have things, like files and pictures. You have to take care of your garden so it does not get messy and hard to use. Digital gardening is a way to make your digital life better and more fun.

Digital gardening is a way to grow your ideas. It is like a garden where your notes and thoughts get bigger and stronger over time. You can think of it like a tree with many branches, like the Evergreens or the pages, in Roam Research. You can also use public Notion workspaces to share your ideas with others. In these spaces your thoughts and ideas are all. They change and grow as you add new things. Digital gardening is a way to make your ideas grow and evolve like a garden that you take care of over time. Digital gardening helps your notes and threads and wikis to grow.

Gardeners put in seeds that’re like little ideas that are not fully thought out. They also plant questions and things they want to try. Then they help these seeds grow by making connections between them. The things they write about do not have all the information, from the start. Instead they become more valuable when other people link to them update them and add their thoughts. The more people work on them the depth the ideas get over time. Gardeners keep working on their seeds. This is how they make them grow. The gardeners and the community make the seeds turn into something valuable.

This way is good, for long term growth. A single note that is always useful can get people to visit it years later when they search for something or when someone shares it.

Key Differences Comparison

Aspect Digital Landscaping Digital Gardening

Content Style Polished, trend-driven posts Raw notes, evolving threads

Creation Process Batch-produced, scheduled Iterative, linked, community-driven

Time Horizon Short-term virality (days/weeks) Long-term authority (months/years)

Maintenance High (constant refresh) Low (evergreen updates)

Audience Growth Algorithm-dependent spikes Organic search + network effects

Risk Burnout, trend obsolescence Initial slow growth

Landscaping gives you results. On the hand gardening is like building a strong wall around your house it takes time but it is very good at keeping everything safe. Landscaping and gardening are two things. Landscaping is what you do to make your yard look nice. It does that quickly. Gardening is when you plant things and take care of them it is, like building a moat around your castle it keeps getting stronger and stronger over time.

The Landscaping Trap

Social media algorithms like things so landscapers have to keep making new content all the time. This is really tiring for brands because they have to try to be relevant every day. They get worn out. Start saying the same things, as everyone else. This means that people do not think the brand is being real anymore because their posts start to look like what everyone else’s posting. Landscapers and brands are trying to be authentic. It is hard when social media algorithms reward novelty.

People are focusing on the things when it comes to engagement. Engagement is not about getting a lot of likes and followers. A post can be really popular. Get a lot of attention but that does not mean people will keep coming back for more. When something is trending on a platform like TikTok people jump on the bandwagon. When the trend changes the whole plan falls apart. Engagement is about getting people to really care about what you have to say and that is what is missing. People are chasing engagement. They are looking at the wrong metrics. Engagement chases metrics and that is the problem. A viral thread, on TikTok can get you a lot of followers. It rarely turns into real loyalty.

When we try hard to make everything perfect we miss out on happy accidents. There is no room for mistakes. Trying something new with our posts. Every single post has to do well or it is basically useless. This is what happens when we overthink the Internet and our posts on the Internet. The Internet and our posts on the Internet should be fun and interesting not, about doing well all the time.

Gardening’s Compounding Magic

Gardeners really like it when things are a little messy. I saw a bunch of tweets about ethics, in intelligence that linked to a wiki page. This page is always changing because people are adding their thoughts and new information is coming out. After a while it turns into a place where people go to learn about artificial intelligence ethics.. People who like artificial intelligence ethics both like to see things grow and change over time.

Search engines really like it when you have a lot of depth. Google has this thing called EE-A-T which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. Googles E-E-A-T favors the kind of content that has links and is updated regularly over content that’s just flashy. This is why gardens I mean websites that’re like gardens they rank higher in the long term, with Googles E-E-A-T.

People work together in communities. The people who follow these communities add links. Start discussions. This turns something one person is doing into a group project. It helps create fans of the community instead of people who just like something, for a little while. Communities really make a difference when people work together like this. Communities are where the people who follow them can share things and talk about them.

Hybrid Strategy Blueprint

Blend both for maximum impact. Use landscaping for acquisition—eye-catching hooks draw eyes. Funnel traffic to gardens where depth converts.

Week 1: Landscape with viral thread summarizing a garden topic.

Ongoing: Link to public wiki for full exploration.

Monthly: Update garden with new insights, tweet progress.

I really like using tools such, as Obsidian, Tana or Capacities for this purpose. For people who work with technology public GitHub repositories are also an option.

We should not focus on things that make us look good but do not really matter. Instead we should pay attention to the number of backlinks people who come to our site from search engines and visitors who come back to our site again and again. A website is like a garden it is really valuable when people keep coming back to it. For example it is better to have one reader who visits our site every months than to have a lot of people who just visit our site once and never come back. This is because the reader who comes back is more valuable to our website in the run.

To see how many people are visiting your garden website you can use something called UTM tags. There are tools like Ahrefs that can show you which websites are linking to your garden website and that is a sign that your garden website is becoming more important and trusted which is called authority growth, for your garden.

Real-World Examples

Andy Matuschaks notes garden is really popular with researchers from around the world.

His essays on learning, the ones that are not fully finished are still getting cited by people years after he wrote them.

Andy Matuschaks notes garden has a lot of information and that is what makes it so great there is no extra stuff, just good ideas, from Andy Matuschaks notes garden.

Sahil Blooms newsletter is like a garden that has links to information. These links are like hooks that grab your attention and lead you to useful resources that are always relevant, not just popular, for a short time. Sahil Blooms newsletter has these hooks that take you to evergreen assets.

When you look at those Instagram accounts that’re really pretty but do not have a face to them they are nice to look at but you will forget about them once the trends are over. This is different from accounts that have a person behind them like the accounts that have a face, to them the Instagram accounts that people can really connect with the real Instagram accounts.

Implementation Steps

Start small. Pick one niche. Write 10 seed notes: questions, frameworks, experiments.

We should link to things a lot. Every time we make a post it should talk about posts. We can use things, like Mkdocs or Notions public pages to help us do this.

When you are working on something do not wait until it is perfect to share it with others. Share it even if it is not completely finished. You can write a message on Twitter that says you are still working on it. You can say it is a “work-in-progress” so people know it is not done yet. Ask people for their thoughts and ideas on what you have far. Invite them to give you feedback so you can make it better. Share your work with others. Ask for their feedback on your “work-, in-progress”.

Patience really pays off. You see gardens take time to bloom. It usually happens in 6 to 12 months. What is interesting is that links compound during this time. So gardens bloom, in 6 to 12 months as these links compound.

Future-Proof Your Presence

Algorithms change over time. The people in charge are still, in control. Taking care of your yard is important now. Planting a garden will help you in the future.

Most strategies miss this balance, stuck in reactive posting. Shift to gardening, and your social presence becomes an asset, not a chore. Build once, benefit forever