issues with my public knowledge base
Last year, I tried out turning my private knowledge base public. I wanted parts of my Obsidian vault on a website to show my growth and knowledge in a space.
It was intended less for evolving opinions over the years like a casual digital garden blog, and more like study notes that will forever get edited and revised. Notes about specific court cases, some of my study notes, notes on events and magazine articles, summaries on laws; I thought it would grow alongside me, and show my expertise in some things, and I'd have an always-accessible hub of my notes and efforts, and even link people to it.
At first, I used my GitHub account and Quartz to deploy a web-version of my Obsidian vault. I experienced some bugs and lots of workarounds, and realized the way I did things would not be stable for future updates. I also ended up updating it so rarely that every time I did want to push changes, I'd have to re-familiarize with it all again, and renew a token in my GitHub account, manage credentials and more. It was a hassle.
So I deleted my GitHub (which I wanted to do anyway, to avoid Microsoft) and moved the notes vault to Bearblog. If I am here all the time anyway, it might make it easier to consistently expand my knowledge base here.
But I also didn't do that. There was still too much friction involved:
- Most of my Obsidian notes are kind of messy, in the sense that they work in private for me, but on a webpage, it's just a huge wall of bullet points and keywords with no formatting. Making them pretty for the notes vault meant investing more time, time that I should use for more useful or fun things. But I also thought: If they are hard to understand or read, why publish them?
- The notes that were already pretty, especially with Obsidian callouts, wouldn't work as well here. I could implement my own callouts, and fischr.org made beautiful ones I could use that look just like the ones in Obsidian, but it would also be additional work to copy the .md file here and then change all callouts and other design to work here.
- Quite a bit of my notes are in German, but enough are in English. Do I do both, do I translate one? That kept me from publishing some stuff.
That meant even going through my Obsidian to see what notes I'd like to transfer over and make public was a bit of a fuss.
Other issues I have with this system are:
- I often just read things and internalize them without writing them down. But I felt weird about a topic missing from my public notes vault. Unwarranted fear, but it made me feel as if people could think I don't know anything about that subject if it wasn't in there.
- I prefer to know where I can find something over creating a copy on my end. So lots of things I'd expect in a notes vault are things I just look up elsewhere and don't need my own, potentially one day outdated version of. I mean Wikipedia, GDPRhub for cases, gesetze-im-internet for laws, etc.
- I know that if I learned about a new development, attended an event, etc. and it was worth writing about, I'd prefer to write a 'proper' blog post about it taking the reader with me, rather than notes that are useful to only me who has all the context.
- If I wrote notes with readers or other third-parties in mind, they'd turn into blog posts, or they'd take a lot more time and including disclaimers and extra info I wouldn't need, clogging everything up with stuff that's redundant to me.
- I often have no interest to revisit past notes or blog posts; I'd rather write a new one as a follow-up. That kind of makes me fundamentally incompatible with keeping notes alive and always changing.
- If I needed a link, a thought, a fact I knew I mentioned somewhere online, I grabbed it from this blog instead; sourcing some claims on here made me remember it better than some notes.
- I wondered where all of this was going - if at some point, I have 700 different posts, do I really go back and edit them if I learn new things? Could I remember that this entry had a bullet point about this niche info that is now outdated or that I don't support anymore?
- I worry about adding to misinformation by sharing my misunderstandings online or not updating a post fast enough. That might be okay for programming and whatever else I've seen this concept of a public knowledge base used for, but is very bad for law.
I think I might just be a fixed, finished blog post kind of person! I want to apply my knowledge to a specific audience or problem instead of just counting it up in a list. I want to write things down because of some situation or feeling that warranted it, and I want to do it in a reader-friendly manner on this blog, and be done with it.
This setup might work better for fields that aren't as vast and dynamic, or for people who only need to update a limited amount of posts/pages; people who already have notes that are pretty readable and who enjoy going back to edit and grow their understanding on the page. I see my blog posts as closed shut, locked, done.
Fitting example: I have a post in my drafts that I've been writing on for a year now, and at this point, I am not even in the same mindset anymore as when I started writing it, the structure is unfamiliar and unfitting to me, and every time I open it, I have to re-read to get a feel for it again. I might have to scrap it and rewrite it entirely.
I wouldn't say second brain stuff doesn't work for me in general, it just doesn't work for me in public, with the expectation that I keep rewriting old work, and having a standard of completeness for myself.
So, farewell soon, notes.avas.space. It hurts a little because of the cute design, but I have a plan for reusing it...
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