Link Search Menu Expand Document

Multiplayer Digital Gardening

  • people.TomCritchlow, #digital_gardens, #Multiplayer

    Tom posted a tweet and I replied - looks really interesting.

  • @tomcritchlow If I had time and node skills I'd build a platform that had:
  • private notes and knowledge management as first party object
  • publish to public wiki/garden
  • publish to blog
  • all multi-author and real time editable
  • store all files as markdown behind the scenes for archive

User stories:

As a user I want to be able to ....

  • Have a fast and speedy way to take notes
  • Use markdown or similar that I'm familiar with
  • Link notes bi-directionally
  • Have confidence in how my data is stored - encrypted at rest?
  • Easily share specific notes to my public wiki/garden
  • Share editing privileges for specific notes
  • Have real-time editing experience
  • Easily export my data in markdown
  • Technical challenges: ##Storage
  • How do we store?
    • Database blobs of markdown? Having the data at rest in a db will allow for speedier retrieval, searching, linking, etc than having them in markdown from the get-go.
    • Some kind of serialized object
    • Does everyone have their own db like in Roam? Is that an actual distinct db?

Realtime editing

Imagine this is going to be websockets based. Pretty well supported in browsers and can be secure.

Bi-directional linking

  • Could use a Roam like syntax and generate nodes automatically.
  • Is there a better UX experience out there yet? Is there one to be created here?

Permissions/sharing

  • How is sharing managed across databases? Do users have to be authenticated on the system to be able to edit? Do we use a 3rd party OAuth provider for this or is FAANG to be avoided?

Exporting notes in their entirety

Shouldn't be a big deal - a multi-level job.

Posting directly to a wiki/garden/blog

Assuming this is a custom platform owned by the user then there would need to be a growing community of plugins - gatsby/wordpress/jekyll/contentful/ghost/tiddlywiki - would need to explore each of those formats and develop separate approaches.

Hosting costs

Zonks! All the data. I guess it's plain text for the most part with links to images? We'd not necessarily store those but embed them for viewing.

Uptime

We'd need to be confident that people could use this service reliably and constantly.

Importing from other platforms

People will want to bring their Roam database and give it a go.