I saw a large collection of public notes and it got me thinking about publishing my own notes. Why not publish them all online?

In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public. (Writing Slowly)

I’ve been creating Zettelkasten-style notes for several years now, mostly to support the process of writing longer, more complete pieces. So my notes really aren’t intended for public consumption. Even though I’m keen on making my notes as clear, concise and modular as I can, still, many of them are rough, inconsistent, and probably incomprehensible to anyone unlucky enough to find themselves reading them. All the same, I can’t help feeling drawn to the idea of publishing them anyway.

That’s because I like the idea of “working with the garage door up” (as Andy Matuschak puts it), and I absolutely love poking around other people’s public note collections — their digital gardens, personal wikis, and half-formed archives. Some of them are beautiful and inspiring, full of loose threads and glimpses of thinking in motion. Others are baffling, and that’s part of their strange charm. They remind me of visiting craft villages in the 1980s where the potters, the artists and the metal-workers would occupy little studios in the converted stables of the old country house (in the UK, obviously!), and you could stand there watching them doing their thing. It was craftwork-as-performance, I suppose.

But should I do it myself? What are the upsides and downsides of putting everything — the messy, partial, and half-baked — out in the open, for casual visitors to gawk at?

Here are some reflections I’ve pulled together on the pros (+) and cons (-), mostly from a recent Reddit thread that helped me to concentrate my scattered thoughts and focus my ambivalence. I asked, ‘why not publish all your notes online?’ - and received some very interesting replies. A painting in which a person leans over a red table while writing, surrounded by scattered papers in a softly lit room.

1. (+) Publishing makes writing feel more real — and more rewarding

For some people, making their notes public adds a bit of ‘shine’ — a small psychological nudge. If it’s out there, it feels more complete, more real, maybe somehow more legitimate. That can be motivating. Even if no one’s reading these public notes, the simple act of publishing gives a sense of purpose to the work.

Publishing-before-polishing might also help in pushing back against perfectionism — especially if you grew up with punishingly high writing standards or have internalised the idea that writing only counts if it’s finished, or polished, or part of something “serious.” Publishing unedited notes becomes a tiny act of kindness to yourself: this is where I’m at, and that’s enough. Dave Winer once said blogging is just “the unedited voice of a person”, or as Jana says, “just a person, putting out what they want”. And now that I think about it, that’s what I’m doing right now. Well then, maybe the next step is just to publish the whole lot.

2. (-) But it might make you second-guess everything

If your Zettelkasten, your collection of notes, is truly for thinking — not presenting — then it will inevitably include contradictions, changes of mind, odd tangents, and things that just don’t make sense outside your own head. And let’s face it, a lot of things don’t make sense outside my own head.

One person put it bluntly: “The Zettelkasten isn’t a place for refined thoughts. Mine is messy, gross, tangled, and full of opinions I might not want others to see.”

This reminded me of how sociologist Niklas Luhmann, he of the massive Zettelkasten, likened his notes to a septic tank. Now a septic tank may be useful, but it’s not a part of the house you’d usually show to guests.

And that’s exactly true for your notes, surely. The moment you imagine someone else looking over your shoulder, your writing starts to shift. You start trying to make the sludge less sludgy. You edit more. You second-guess your phrasing. You may even worry about being misunderstood, judged, or taken out of context. Maybe that’s the down-side of ‘shiny’. This kind of self-censorship, if it happens, risks getting in the way of the very thinking process — largely private and interior, says I — that the Zettelkasten is meant to support.

3. (-) Not everything belongs online

There’s also the question of privacy. A few people mentioned that their note collections include sensitive material — references to clients, personal memories, login details (eek!). It’s easy to blur the lines when everything’s in one system. You might start writing something private and only later realise it shouldn’t have been there.

You can, of course, separate public and private notes. Soren Bjornstad does this very clearly: what’s visible online, he says, is just one layer of a larger, mostly private system. That approach makes a lot of sense — but presumably it’s also a bit more work. The truth is, I’d almost certainly get this wrong. A single ‘public’ tag placed in error and all my deepest secrets would surely be revealed. The horror! (OK, no one would care, but still.)

4. (-) Other people might not find your notes useful — or even legible

My individual notes aren’t articles. They’re often fragments, sentence-stubs, or even diagrams, that mainly make sense in a wider web of meaning. A lot of the meaning resides in the links. Even when shared, they’re not necessarily built for outside readers.

One commenter was blunt: “Publishing notes in their native form must be the lowest energy effort I’ve seen so far.” Another said: “Unfinished thoughts online are pointless — no one but yourself would understand them.”

That may be true. But I think it depends on the format, the tone, and the audience. One person commented that they’ve seen and enjoyed notes that feel more like blog posts: short reflections that are personal but still intelligible. When someone’s writing with just a hint of awareness that others might be reading — even if the writing is still in note form — it changes the texture, and for the reader at least, this may be for the better.

5. (+) But sometimes a note is all you need

For others, sharing notes is about being part of an ongoing conversation. You don’t need to write a whole article every time you want to contribute something (looks like I do, because I’m fatally verbose, so sue me). A link to a note — if it’s relevant, coherent, and on-topic — can do the job. Especially in professional communities, it can be a way of saying, “I’ve thought a bit about this — now here’s where I’m at.” In this sense, public notes are a lot like social media posts. You’re happy to put them out there as a means of ‘finding the others’, but you don’t necessarily want them to be held up as your best work ever.

When your notes are already in reasonably good shape, and already feeding into talks, posts, and projects, publishing them just makes sense. They don’t need to be perfect — just coherent enough to be useful. And perhaps that’s the threshold that matters most.

6. (-) It’s not always easy to find the good ones

One reason I don’t always browse other people’s notes is simply that they’re hard to find — especially in niche areas. If someone’s notes intersect with something I care about, it can be a real delight to find them. But discovering those little gems usually takes time, context, or whatever the internet equivalent is for word-of-mouth.

Bring back webrings, someone said. I agree - at least with the sentiment. We definitely need new ways of unearthing this stuff. Personally I’m still keen on RSS as a kind of glue for the indieweb (I know it has issues but I just like it).

7. (+) Still, I’m always on the look-out

Even if I know I won’t “get” much of it, I can’t resist looking. I love the aesthetics of notes — the eccentric emoji-coding, the fiesta of links, the mad web-design skillz, the rhythm of someone else’s thought process made quirkily visible.

Note system aesthetics. What a niche to be in love with!

Sometimes I’m inspired, sometimes my curiosity is piqued. And sometimes it’s just nice to know there are other people out there quietly thinking things through.

8. (+) Public notes are a useful staging post

So this is where I’ve ended up: thinking of public notes not as polished end-products, but as sitting somewhere between private scraps and finished writing.

That’s the principle of the digital garden — you publish early, and let your saplings grow in public. Notes start as “seeds”, then grow into “shoots”, and eventually into “trees”. Some fall by the wayside. Some are pruned. Some sprout surprising branches. And by this time, the metaphor has worn a bit thin.

In his excellent collection of public notes Bill Seitz describes this as “tending your inner and outer gardens” — maintaining both a private system (where you’re free to be messy), and a public-facing one (where ideas get air, attention, and refinement). I quite like this approach.

In fact, it’s already what I do — at least loosely. My private notes feed into slightly more polished pieces: blog posts, public notes, odd fragments I toss online (I have an ineptitude for Mastodon and BlueSky). Some of those get reshaped later into longer essays or more structured arguments. Some don’t. But publishing early makes the next stage easier — and the stages after that more likely.

Thoreau and Emerson, those legendary nineteenth century American writers, wrote in their journals, gave public lectures, edited those talks into essays, and then eventually collected and revised them again for publication. Multiple iterations. A rhythm of emergence.

Maybe the 21st-century equivalent looks something like this:

  • fleeting notes / rough journal entries →
  • Zettelkasten main notes →
  • public notes →
  • blog posts / podcasts / videos →
  • essays / articles →
  • ebooks →
  • physical books (and back to the start - it’s a cycle)

Of course, not every idea travels the full distance. But the opportunity is there. And each stage helps shape the next.

So, should I publish all my notes online?

No, I don’t think so — it’s just not for me.

I like the rhythm of keeping the first iterations private, then working them into something a bit more coherent and longer, like this post you’re reading now. That’s what feels right for the present.

The image that for me best sums up this process of making short notes to create longer pieces of writing is that of my little worm farm. All sorts of scraps get dumped in at the top. And mostly unseen, the worms turn everything into nourishing compost. writingslowly.com

But I’ll keep reading the note collections other people publish. And rest assured, writing slowly and selectively, I’ll keep sharing little bits of my own.

Some public Zettelkästen worth exploring

If you’re curious to see how others do it — and what kinds of forms a public Zettelkasten might take — here are a few that I keep coming back to (tbh this list is mostly for my own reference but you might also be curious):

Public Zettelkästen and Digital Gardens

  • Andy Matuschak’s Notes
    A semi-public digital notebook, full of interlinked thoughts on memory, learning, and tools for thought. These are really mini-blog posts, surely with at least one eye to the reader.

  • Soren Bjornstad’s Zettelkasten
    A thoughtfully maintained collection of Zettelkasten-inspired notes, with strong links and clear explanations. This is based on TiddlyWiki, which I also use, and I’m full of admiration for this tricked-out iteration (mine’s a bit more basic). But it’s not a Zettelkasten, since Soren says his collection of notes has outgrown that term.

  • Jon M Sterling’s Mathematical Zettelkasten
    Dense, precise, and full of logical clarity — a beautiful, inspiring example of a Zettelkasten in a formal discipline. And I’ve written about it previously at A forest of evergreen notes.

  • Maggie Appleton’s Notes
    Designer, anthropologist, and digital gardener — her ‘digital garden’ is playful, exploratory, well-organised and yes, impeccably designed.

  • Binny’s Digital Zen Garden
    This is a creative take on the digital garden format — a bit philosophical, a bit experimental, and Binny wrote a book, Zettelkasten and the Art of Knowledge Management, so that’s cool.

  • A Working Library by Mandy Brown
    Not strictly a Zettelkasten, but a really elegant example of thought-in-process, evolving across essays and notes. I wish my site was as nice as this. Sigh.

  • Barns Worth Burning OK, so this one’s not really a Zettlkasten either. It’s more like a pot-pourri of interesting fragments. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki? Certainly. In other words, I like it a lot.

  • Nikita Voloboev’s Wiki
    Another sprawling and highly structured knowledge base, grounded in personal note-taking practice. I mean sprawlng as in “I approve”.

  • Zac Burry’s Garden
    Yet again more of a digital garden, but still grounded in Zettelkasten principles: atomic notes, dense links, no blog-post polish.

  • Anagora
    I don’t really understand this group site (if it even is that?) but it looks interesting.

  • Nagitimi85
    Here’s a nice public notes collection that’s just getting going - published using Obsidian and Quartz.

Curated Lists and Directories

If you’ve got others to add, please let me know. And since you’ve read this far you might even like to subscribe to my weekly email digest - all the posts in one handy package.