Walled Gardens An *actual* walled garden is usually considered to be quite nice. A little place filled with flowers, maybe some fruit trees or vegetables, and ... walls ... to keep deer and rabbits out. A gardener (or multiple gardeners) to keep plucking weeds, to spray pesticides and herbicides and just generally keep the place nice and inviting. If you've ever created a system for people to come and enjoy then you probably ended up creating a walled garden and took on the roll of the gardener. If you run a BBS then anything that's on, or a part of, the BBS is within it's walls. You cultivate conversation, you squash bugs (programming bugs), you eliminate weeds in the form of toxic people who only come to cause trouble. You clear out dead leaves (old messages that clutter up the message boards) or trim dead branches (threads). Your intention was to create a nice little place where a community can grow and thrive, much like the gardener does in his/her garden. This holds true for other systems as well: Public Access UNIX/Linux systems, Web Forums, Moderated Sub-Reddits and Discord channels, Facebook groups, personal homepages on Neocities. It doesn't matter what it is, it's almost always a walled garden. We point the finger at large corporate run systems like Facebook, X, Instagram, etc... and use the term "Walled Garden" with disdain, as if "Walled Gardens" are the problem. As if by *not* using those systems we're freeing ourselves from walled gardens. As if coming to a BBS or a PubNix or some obscure web forum, or even an IRC channel puts out outside the walls. Yes, we're outside of *those* walls, but we're in some other walls. I don't know that there's really any alternative. I guess Usenet might be more of a "fenced" garden or maybe just a garden that doesn't have a gardener so you are left having to pluck the ("Buy Ketamine!") weeds by yourself to get to the fruit (actual, on-topic, posts). So what exactly is the point I'm making here? Am I saying that our little hobby-run walled gardens are the same as for-profit, stockholder driven, corporate walled gardens? Absolutely not. The best we can do is try to be bees and not slugs. Slugs don't move around much, they tend to stay where they are and probably never make it out of whatever garden they find themselves in. Bees fly around all over the place and have no problem flying over those walls to collect pollen from whatever garden they want. Here's how that translates to us humans living a digital life in this era: If you're shopping for a (some random thing), don't *start* your search on Amazon.com. If you do then you're being a slug in Amazon's walled garden. You're denying any other online retailer the opportunity to serve your needs. Search far and wide. If you end up purchasing from Amazon then that's fine but at least you tried to see who else might benefit from your business. If you call BBSs, don't *just* call Particles, or Level 29, or Community. I don't know how you want to do this, here's how I do it. I keep a little black book of BBSs with their addresses, my user # (for systems that require you to log in with your #), and the password for that system. I call them in order (alphabetical). One BBS every morning, two if the first session was quick. When I see a new BBS being advertised, I add it to my little black book. When you go to explore Gopherspace are you starting at the same portal each time? Floodgap, SDF, or even more narrowly: SDF's Phlogosphere? Or someone else's phlogroll? Try this: gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/ogup/rnd Each time you refresh this you get 5 random gopher links pulled from the Observable Gopherspace Universe Project (ogup) which *attempts* to index every known gopher server. If you listen to Internet Radio streams like aNONradio, tilderadio, etc... don't *just* listen to that. Go looking for others, dig deep, search thoroughly, go to Google or DuckDuckGo's 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and even 5th page. Find the sites that don't have paid SEO experts putting their sites at the top of the search rankings. It is our natural tendency to fall into ruts. The fact that there is only 24 hours in a day, 16 of which we're awake (if we're getting enough sleep), and half of that is spent working for 'da man (plus travel time, usually) means we tend to just do what's easy, what we know. It also means that we don't often have time to add *yet another* walled garden to our itinerary. So to visit some place new we may have to (temporarily) put some place familiar on hold. Most importantly we need to be conscientious of our natural habits to fall into ruts, recognize that is happening, and actively try to keep discovering new things, new gardens. We are almost always in a walled garden no matter where we go or what we do. The best we can do is try to visit as many different walled gardens as we can. ----- Now a closing comment and advice for gardeners. I have *specific* gardeners in mind. Some of you know to whom I refer, especially those who come to my BBS (my walled garden) and have read some of the conversation we've been having lately: If you run a system and it's grown too big for you to maintain, or your heart just isn't in it anymore, but it is home to a large community of great users who love the system and use it anyway even though half of it is broken, but every day grow more frustrated with the weeds and the bugs and the decay, then you owe it to that community to find someone else who can take over the gardening and restore the system to its former glory. Either find new gardeners (admins) to do the work or start to empower some of the users who have been around a while, have the time and energy to put into it, and let them help to maintian the garden. Because just hand-picking the particular weeds you want to pluck while the rest of the garden gets overrun (and run down) is a disservice to the whole community. .