Federating Your Second Brain

Rewilding Notes into Gardens, Newsletters, and Networks

Reclaim Open 2025 • 30 minutes • Theme: Rewilding the Network – Making New Connections

🌱 Introduction – Rewilding Knowledge Work

What if your notes didn't have to live in a walled garden?

Most personal knowledge management (PKM) systems end up as digital compost heaps: rich, valuable, but locked away in proprietary apps where only you can benefit. We collect, we connect, we curate—but rarely do we cultivate in public.

Rewilding knowledge work means:

• Breaking notes free from single-platform silos
• Letting ideas grow in the open where others can discover them
• Creating permeable boundaries between private thinking and public sharing
• Building networks that mirror how knowledge actually spreads: organically, gradually, through interconnection

Today's journey:

1. Why federation matters for knowledge workers
2. What a "federated second brain" actually looks like
3. How you can start growing your own
4. Where this all might lead

🌿 From Second Brain → Federated Garden

The Second Brain Trap

The "second brain" metaphor is compelling, but incomplete. Brains are:

• ✅ Networked and associative
• ✅ Always processing in the background
• ❌ Isolated inside our skulls

What if we evolved the metaphor? What if your second brain could:

• Breathe through RSS feeds and newsletters
• Pollinate other gardens through backlinks and webmentions
• Grow roots across platforms: Obsidian → blog → Mastodon → newsletter → digital garden or personal wiki
• Compost old ideas into new forms

What Is a Federated Garden?

A federated digital garden is a personal knowledge space that:

1. Starts private (your vault, your chaos, your unfinished thoughts)
2. Grows selectively public (some notes bloom into garden pages)
3. Connects across platforms (one source → many destinations)
4. Links bidirectionally (gardens can discover and reference each other)

Key principles:

• Gradual disclosure: Not everything needs to be public—choose what to share
• Version multiplicity: A note can exist as a draft, a garden page, a newsletter piece, and a toot
• Decentralized ownership: You control the source, not a platform
• Interoperability: Uses open standards (Markdown, RSS, ActivityPub, HTML)

💡 Why This Matters Now: The Balance of Opportunity and Risk

We are at a crossroads where digital growth must be weighed against digital safety. The opportunity is tremendous, but it comes with a new set of responsibilities regarding privacy and data.

1. The Opportunity: Pushing Pause for Growth

My goal in this is to treat knowledge as a living, collaborative process, not a series of finished articles.

The result: You gain compound interest on your learning. Your notes become searchable, linkable assets that grow faster in the open than they ever could in isolation.

2. The Risks: Guarding Your Garden

Decentralizing your knowledge means you take full responsibility for its security and privacy. The open nature of federation introduces two main risks:

A. Privacy and Security Concerns

Putting notes online, even as "seedlings," requires intentional filtering (Phase 1).

• Risk: Accidentally publishing sensitive client data, private journal entries, or incomplete, misleading research.

• Guardrail: Strict adherence to the Tagging Workflow. Everything defaults to #private. Only notes explicitly tagged #share pass through the publishing filter. Use clear folder structures to separate sensitive data that should never touch the publishing pipeline.

B. AI Scraping and Data Use

Any public text on the web is susceptible to being scraped and ingested by large language models (LLMs) for training purposes.

• Risk: Your unique, early-stage thinking (your #seedlings) is used without your permission or attribution to train commercial AI products.

• Guardrail: Understand that by publishing openly, you are contributing to the public commons. While tools like RSS and ActivityPub promote human-to-human connection, they are also easily readable by bots. You must accept that any content tagged for publication is now public data. If the originality or commercial value of a note is paramount, consider:

  • Delayed Sharing: Keep the idea private longer until it's developed into a full Evergreen note.

  • Creative Commons: Explicitly apply an open license to your garden content, allowing reuse but requiring attribution.

The Conclusion

The tension between openness for growth and ownership for control defines the Federated Garden. We are moving from a platform-dependent web to a content-dependent web. By controlling the source (your Obsidian vault) and the pipes (RSS/ActivityPub), you choose the balance: you own the data, you choose the risk, and you reap the growth.

I'm hoping to learn from you all how to do that. :)

🛠️ My Setup / Demo

The Stack

Here's how my federated garden works in practice:

1. Obsidian (The Source of Truth)

• Daily notes, fleeting thoughts, project folders
• Metadata via YAML frontmatter (dg-publish: true for garden candidates)
• Bidirectional linking creates organic structure
• Plugins: Dataview, Templater, Digital Garden

2. Digital Garden (The Public Layer)

• Selective publishing: dg-publish: true → live
• Maintains backlinks and graph view
• Custom CSS for readability
• Hosted via Netlify (free tier)

3. 11ty (Static Site Options)

• Transforms Markdown → beautiful HTML
• Backlinks become actual hyperlinks
• RSS feeds for everything
• Zero maintenance after setup

4. Newsletter Integration (Buttondown)

• Manual: Polish garden notes → cross-post
• Automated: RSS-to-email for new publications
• Links back to canonical garden URL

What I'm trying to figure out:
5. Fediverse Presence (Mastodon / Bluesky)

• Share garden updates via Mastodon
• WriteFreely for long-form ActivityPub posts
• Syndicate with POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
• Updates on digital garden "announced" through Fediverse

Reflection question: Where in your current workflow could you push pause and insert a "publish to garden" step?

💡 Why This Matters

For You

Compound interest on learning:

• Your notes become searchable, linkable assets
• Ideas mature in public view (less pressure for perfection)
• Future-you benefits from past-you's thinking
• Writing becomes thinking out loud

Ownership & longevity:

• Your content isn't held hostage by platform TOS changes
• Export is trivial (it's just Markdown files)
• Links don't break when you move hosts
• 10-year thinking horizon becomes feasible

Serendipity:

• People discover your work through search, RSS, backlinks
• Conversations start from shared curiosity, not engagement metrics
• Your garden becomes a collaboration surface

For the Web

Rebuilding the open web:

• Every garden is a node in a distributed knowledge network
• RSS and ActivityPub create platform-independent discovery
• Backlinks weave the web back together
• Small, independent sites counter algorithmic monoculture

Alternative to extractive platforms:

• No ads, no surveillance, no algorithmic manipulation
• Slow web: ideas over virality, depth over reach
• Gift economy: freely share knowledge, strengthen commons

Epistemological diversity:

• Multiple perspectives preserved, not flattened by trending topics
• Partial, evolving knowledge valued alongside "expert" content
• Learning happens through connection, not consumption

Reflection question: What would change if you optimized for long-term discoverability instead of next-week engagement?

🤝 Join the Conversation

Let's Build Together

This presentation itself is a living document. After today:

• These notes will continue evolving in my garden
• I'll publish a longer blog reflection
• I'll share resources and tool recommendations

I'd love to hear:

• What's blocking you from publishing your notes?
• Which tools are you already using?
• What kind of garden would you grow?

Continue Learning

Dive deeper with the companion guide: Build Your Own Federated Garden

📚 Further Reading

Digital Gardening

• Maggie Appleton – A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
• Andy Matuschak – Evergreen notes
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff – Ness Labs on digital gardening

IndieWeb & Federation

• IndieWeb Wiki – POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
• Tom Critchlow – Building a Digital Garden
• Kicks Condor – The Small Internet

Tools & Tutorials

• Obsidian Digital Garden Plugin
• Quartz – Fast static site generator for Obsidian
• ActivityPub Primer
• Webmention.io

Example Gardens Worth Exploring

• Maggie Appleton's Garden
• Andy Matuschak's Notes
• Gwern.net
• Tom Critchlow's Wiki