This week’s been pretty occupied with a non incremental game my friend worked on, called Millennia. It’s been very time sucking, but in a good way.

I’ve also been working on mocking up this fictitious app about digital gardening, and in general improving how the Internet communicates with you, with the goal of making it healthier. The idea for this app is it would be able to connect to matrix chat, email, RSS feeds, and potentially other sources and then you can write rules to categorize these: stuff like direct messages, stuff about that school project you’re working on, online content creators you follow, and perhaps a category for just stuff you’re interested in but don’t need to know about every update for. These categories will be able to be assigned priorities: basic stuff like whether or not to send notifications, but also whether or not to show a count of items in that category. Some categories might feel more like a todo list, like DMs, but others should just collect things for you to occasionally check up on, without the pressure of a number or unread dot.

You’d still be able to chat and email and stuff from within the app as well. It’d integrate concepts like chat glue in chat threads (when supported by the data source), and make it easy to copy data over to your personal “garden”, which will work similarly to a personal wiki. The garden would be a collection of thoughts in varying states of growth - incomplete thoughts to entire articles, all collected in a way such that you can easily see related thoughts and navigate the garden like a web (to mix metaphors haha). Overall I think it’s a cool idea, but one that’d be too big for me to complete. But the mock will help with giving something that can be spread around so people can get interested in helping out, or at least providing feedback on the idea. I’m quite excited about it!