The Thicket
The thicket is the network of blygs: every blyg, and every quote, pin, fork and mention that ties one to another. It used to be called the blygosphere. The name comes from Aneesh Sathe, whose essay Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web set the forest's undergrowth against the platform's manicured garden, and who later wrote of a blyg post as humus, "left there to decompose, combine, nourish, and be taken up elsewhere. It does not need to know what it will become. It only needs to be available to the thicket."
An explorer for the thicket
An explorer is planned for blygger.com, which today is a directory of blygs. The idea takes its cue from blockchain block explorers. Those tools let anyone take a public ledger nobody owns, follow any transaction back to where its inputs came from, and see what each address has touched. The thicket is a public record in the same sense. Every item has an address, a version history and a changelog. Every quote is a snapshot of a named version, with a record of where it came from, and forks and pins name exact versions. The structure is already in the files. What's missing is a way to see it.
The aim is to map the thicket and make it navigable without flattening it into a feed or a ranking. A thicket is walked, not surveyed: an explorer should help you follow trails from item to item and blyg to blyg, the way the people who write in it already do.
Things it might show:
- An item: its versions and pins, every place it has been quoted or forked, and how those quotes spread from blyg to blyg.
- A blyg: what it quotes, who quotes it, its blogroll and its mentions.
- A thread: the fragments it is built from, traced back through quotes of quotes to their origins.
- Where the thicket grows: posts become visible to the explorer when they cross from one blyg to another, through a quote, a stub, a fork or a mention, so the map follows what people actually picked up.
Until then
- blygger.com lists the blygs in the thicket.
- The ecosystem index lists the clients and tools they run on.
- Build a blyg to grow it.
Ideas for the explorer are welcome: open an issue on blygger-com.