The web was supposed to be a garden — wild, tangled, and alive. Instead we got feeds, tabs, and algorithmic landlords. Digital gardens are pushing back: personal, non-linear collections of notes, ideas, links, and media, tended over time and shaped by the gardener's own logic rather than an algorithm's. They are the web as it was imagined before the feed took over.

Tapestries grows from the same soil. Developed in collaboration with the Internet Archive, it is a tool for thinking and publishing differently. You drag digital objects — text, images, audio, video, software, entire web pages — onto a blank infinite canvas. Size, placement, and arrangement are entirely up to you. The result is not a document, a feed, or a slideshow. It is a living assemblage: a tapestry you can embed anywhere on the web, that readers can explore, comment on, fork, and remake as their own.

This session runs as a genuine garden club, or weaving circle: a space where people come together around a shared practice, contribute according to their capacity, and leave with something made collectively that none of them could have made alone. There are three ways in:

Plant — Participants new to Tapestries are guided through making their first one. The prompt is rooted in the web we want: the knowledge we want to tend, the connections we want to make visible. Individual Tapestries made in parallel become a distributed garden — different plots, same soil, open to all.

Tend — A collective Tapestry stays live and projected throughout the session, an open canvas anyone can contribute to: a quote, an image, a web page, a piece of audio, a link to their own digital garden. It becomes a living document of the room's thinking, shaped by everyone present and authored by no single voice.

Graft — For developers and the technically curious, this strand opens the tool itself to scrutiny and reimagining. What's missing? What should it connect to? What would make Tapestries genuinely useful in low-bandwidth environments, in languages other than English, or for accessibility needs the current build doesn't meet? Feedback is compiled and shared publicly afterward as a community wishlist that seeds the next phase of development.

Every participant who plants or weaves leaves with something real: a working Tapestry, embeddable on any web page, shareable with their community, and open to continued tending. The garden doesn't close when the session does — it's the first meeting of an ongoing community of practice, with an open, community-shaped roadmap and a fork-and-remake culture built into the tool itself.

At its root this is a session about the kind of web we want to live in. Not the web of engagement metrics and extractive platforms, or the web flooded with AI slop and crawling with automated agents, but the web of the digital garden: personal, porous, human, tended with care, and open to whoever wants to come and explore it for a while. Gloves optional. Weeds welcome.