I keep notes but don't yet have a public "digital garden". Here are my excuses:

Thinking in private

You act different if you know you're being watched, and I wouldn't have written some of my notes in the same way if I knew they would be published. Some aren't in complete sentences. Others include personal information and passwords, which makes them more useful as notes but less useful as publishable artifacts. More times than I'd like to admit, I've settled for terrible wording and sentence structure simply to get out of the trap of endlessly rewording a sentence.

I don't like reading my own writing before it's given an editing pass. I talk in easily-cuttable circles a lot. Cutting weasel words takes conscious effort.

Technological complexity

For better or for worse Markdown has taken over the world. The small set of rich text features it supports (lists, headings, bold/italic, the occasional table) are incredibly valuable tools for thought, and I usually hate syntactical arguments but asterisks really are easier to type than words-inside-angle-brackets; so these tools are only ever a few keystrokes away.

But my current website is powered by a terrifying pile of Javascript and makefile jank just for the task of transforming Markdown files into something suitable for the web. Some of that is self-inflicted - I need "frontmatter" because of the limitations of the blog format, and I definitely could have used an off-the-shelf static site generator.

Markdown is limiting. It is hard to extend. Bloggers who write in Markdown but think in asides, Socratic dialogues, and diagrams have a hell of a time bending Markdown into shape.

Braggadociousness

No but seriously, why would anyone want to read my notes?

There's an arrogance to note-publishing that I haven't been able to shake. This post feels too cheesy to write, too.

By "publishing" something, you assert that it's important, and half-baked notes are not very important. It feels like the end of the early days of microblogging, when humanity collectively decided we were sick of seeing pictures of what our friends had for lunch and wanted to read more substantive things from each other.

But

The web is very malleable. If I don't like the wording of a sentence, I can update it. I worry about making substantive edits to blog posts, but I don't think people have the same expectations for notes pages.

Plaintext is not that bad? I often don't read my Markdown notes as Markdown. Looking at ## headings and * * italics is enough to evoke the ideas of headings and emphasis; Markdown's syntax was inspired by plaintext email conventions, after all. And there are easier ways to format Markdown to HTML. I'm of the firm opinion that most software complexity exists because we're stuck using the wrong abstraction. Maybe this blog software is the wrong abstraction.

Change the mental idea of what it means to "publish" online. Don't put an RSS feed on the pile of notes? Microblogging services are on "the web", but noone looks the other way when half-cooked thoughts find their way onto those places.