Posted on

Federating Your Second Brain: Rewilding Notes into Gardens, Newsletters, and Networks

Personal knowledge management (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Zotero, and Hypothesis often become private archives, second brains locked away. But what if we treat them as starting points for connection rather than endpoints of storage? This session explores federating as a metaphor: moving from private notes → to public contributions → to connected spaces across the open web.

I’ll share my workflow for moving ideas through different stages of growth (seeds → plants → evergreens) and how these notes branch outward into digital gardens, newsletters, and blogs. In this sense, a PKM system becomes not just a personal archive but a node in a larger ecosystem. Feeding many-to-many connections instead of staying siloed.

Participants will see practical examples of:

  • Designing PKM workflows that move ideas from private notes into public, open formats.

  • Building digital gardens and newsletters as “rewilded” spaces for knowledge-sharing.

  • Extending the spirit of Domain of One’s Own into personal publishing pipelines.

This won’t just be a show-and-tell. I want to hear from participants about their own workflows, questions, and whether they’d want to learn how to build this kind of system themselves. Together we’ll think about what it means to treat our second brains not just as vaults but as living, federated habitats for voice, creativity, and connection.

Session Author(s):

wiobyrne

Session Resources:

PKM & Digital Gardens

Tools & Open Infrastructure

Rewilding Knowledge

  • Jim Groom & Brian Lamb, Reclaiming Innovation – https://www.educause.edu/visuals/shared/er/extras/2014/ReclaimingInnovation/default.html

  • Anne-Laure Le Cunff, How to set up your own digital garden – https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up

  • Craig Mod, Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters – https://craigmod.com/essays/newsletters/

  • Robin Sloan, A Year of New Avenues – https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/

  • Ink & Switch, Local-First Software – https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

Comments Archive

reclaimhosting: Welcome to the Chat
Readywriting: Look, I found that chat! :-)
Stephen Downes: Hola
Mark: Hi Lee!
reclaimhosJim Grting: Hi ian, thanks so much for presenting, great to have you!
Stephen Downes: I don't do interaction ;)
maren: Here are some links from Ian https://wiobyrne.com/from-cv-to-living-web/
maren: And another one https://wiobyrne.com/federating-the-self/
Readywriting: I'm really interested in this, as I am currently caught between my old personal site and the new one, one is wild, the other is...not.
Mark: Hi Stephen You've been interacting about baseball!
Jim Groom: I also love the project Ian is doing to build his home network that I found from the OL Daily a couple of times recently. Great stuff
Readywriting: I was told by my PhD program to have no web presence at all, since it was a fad and "unprofessional" lmao
Stephen Downes: Baseball is different
Stephen Downes: I really like the home network thing
maren: This is the second post https://wiobyrne.com/federating-the-self/
Jim Groom: In many ways i am more and more retreating to the blog as the sole source of truth, even if I use various other sites to connect. The hardest piece of this still, for me, is video. Are you playing with tools like YouTube and PeerTube?
Mo Pelzel: Cold brew coffee ... would love to see those recipes!
Pilot: All the love for Obsidian! (And *no* love for Mailchimp.)
taylorjadin: Mailchimp is kind of a nightmare, for a lot of reasons. I highly recommend people use other stuff for mail and newsletters if you have a choice! You can guess probably guess my recommendation https://archive.reclaim.tv/search?search=ghost&searchTarget=local but there are other good options
Cogdog the Blog: I was going to suggest Maggie Appletons garden but Ian has it covered.
taylorjadin: Obsidian fan here! Love it
HibbittsDesign: Markdown ❤️
Pilot: Taylor and I have experimented with Quartz on Reclaim TV before, but the Digital Garden Docs tool is new to me 👀
Mark: Does anyone use Logseq?
Rushaw: Had a chance to see Anne-Laure Le Cunff at SXSW EDU and she was great. Been following her ever since!
Pilot: @Mark new to me, but it looks cool. This one, right? https://logseq.com/
taylorjadin: Yeah this plugin is new to me and it looks great. Really nice thats its a plugin instead of requiring a seperate cli thing like Quartz does.
Stephen Downes: I like the concept but I really worry about depending on a tool/platform like Obsidian because it will eventually enshittify
Mark: @Pilot Yes. @Stephen That's the reason I use Logseq.
Mark: Chunkify!
taylorjadin: Yeah thats the only thing with Obsidian. The app is free but not open source, and they make money off of other services on top of it like Sync and Publish. Its a model I mostly like but its NOT as good as full open source of course. The upside for me is the notes are just markdown files so I don't have to loose access should I choose to leave. Mark recently turned me on to Logseq so I want to give that a shot as well
Pilot: @Taylor It all being in .md is what keeps me comfy with it. The biggest things I would feel the loss on Obsidian are the ability to nest stuff without it messing up my links, the interface customizations, & Sync, but I think if I had to move away it would still be pretty smooth.
Pilot: The fact that people keep making open source alternatives to Obsidian Publish (like Quartz & Digital Garden Docs) is interesting to me, people *really* aren't interested in paying to publish their own MD files
Mark: I'm hoping to be able to make a navigable knowlecge map.
taylorjadin: There are other tools that use the same linking and tagging features in Markdown, so that stuff in theory would also be portable. Thats for instance, what makes quartz and the digital garden plugin possible. I have played with a neovim plugin to do obisdian linking at the command line, for example, so a tool like that might be the thing
taylorjadin: Quartz is very complicated, its neat but it took me a long time to get my head around and ultimatelyi I don't love it
taylorjadin: https://archive.reclaim.tv/w/3ZkFZxjYVU9YKeQEvf3QDv
Stephen Downes: I really don't think we can create a visual 'map' that (a) comprehends all the knowledge we actually have, and (b) is usefully navigable
Stephen Downes: I also looked at Quartz, it didn't sparkle for me
Mark: I've gotten lost in federating Ghost, Peertube, Castopod, Pixelfed, and Logseq. Who want to join a group to discuss these challenges?
Pilot: @Stephen Makes me think about the conversation that came up in the Wondercat session earlier re: how do you make networked graphs at scale without them just becoming visual noise
Pilot: @Mark Some kind of federation book club? (for lack of a better term)
Mark: Mark is down with markdown!
Pilot: Thank you for this Ian!!
Readywriting: I don't want a local AI to mine all my writing to gain deeper insights because I don;t think I'd like it lol
Mark: @Pilot Yes! A Google doc can start us off.
Readywriting: Thanks!
Mark: @Lee Thats the reason to keep it local.
Mark: @Lee Eschew LLMs!