Obsidian is one of the best personal knowledge management (PKM) tools out there. It has a flourishing ecosystem of plugins, is a leading product that embodies the file over app philosophy, and is 100% user funded.
Yet, these personalized knowledge environments tend to remain closed off and disconnected from our social networks.
Digital Gardening has become one of the main way to share parts of our PKM environments with the rest of the world. However, digital gardening tends to be a much more involved process. Additionally, even after someone's notes are published, there are no simple ways to connect digital gardens together or to integrate them in a social network with discovery, notifications and other kinds of social interactions.
Semble Collect, our official Obsidian plugin for Semble, is our attempt at bridging some of these gaps. In other words, collective digital gardening with less overhead and more social networking.
Rather than focusing on notes as the unit of knowledge to publish, as traditional digital gardening does, Semble Collect focuses on the links that are in your notes as the units of knowledge to share and organize.
You don't need to wait until your notes are polished enough before you can share anything. If you found a link useful enough to add to your notes, chances are other people in your network will be interested in it too!
Semble Collect offers a new way to explore and contribute to a social knowledge network, rooted in your own note-taking environment.
Use the plugin to easily save and organize any of the links in the current note to Semble. Not only does it help you manage the links in your knowledge base, it lets you leave behind knowledge trails for others to discover. The plugin also provides context about each link, letting you see who else saved the same links or find related content added by other users.
A Vision of the Future of Social Media
As Peng et al. describe in their piece From Feeds to Trails, to fix social media we need to "rethink the interface before the algorithm." They describe a vision of the future of social media where we collectively create interconnected information environments that we navigate via "associative trails" rather than algorithmic feeds.
This has been the vision for Semble all along. We think that seamlessly connecting personal knowledge management tools to trail-based social networks like Semble is how we make this future happen.
You can install the plugin here.
Happy collective knowledge gardening 🌱