I use my wiki as a place to think in public.
Sometimes that means structured notes, sometimes free-flowing subjective pages, sometimes experiments with tools like surveys or Discourse Graphs.
Nothing I do here requires anyone else to follow the same style. Every author in the federation keeps their own voice, their own metaphysics, and their own way of writing.
Zach's sticker in honor of our back and forth. matrix 
If a tool I’m exploring is useful to you, feel free to pick it up. If not, your pages remain completely your own — untouched and unimposed upon. This wiki is a place of optional structure, never prescribed structure. See Optional Structure Only
question
Given how you use your Wiki, what is the value you get out of federation? –– Konrad Hinsen via matrix
claim
What I get out of federation is the one thing I cannot generate inside my own wiki: trajectories I did not author.
My personal wiki is, as I describe on the “How I Use My Wiki → Optional Structure Only → Subjectivity Welcome Here” path, a subjective memory system. Its value comes from idiosyncrasy, not from structure imposed from above.
Federation adds the precisely opposite value:
I see how someone else folded a similar concept, or how a completely different conceptual style touches the same term. In my own wiki, this can’t happen. In the federation, it happens every day.
A fork is never “agreement,” it is an alignment event. A surprising fork from someone else produces a new trajectory through my page — a trajectory I did not anticipate but can now explore. This is impossible inside a single-writer wiki.
I keep my structure “optional.” Others don’t. The contrast is generative: it helps me see which of my pages actually carry portable distinctions versus which ones only make sense inside my personal context.
My personal wiki is a memory prosthesis for one person. Federation is a memory ecology: no imposed consensus, no global index, but drifting connections, resonances, and re-uses. The value is not a “shared truth” but shared adjacency.
The Claim Link Survey probes make this very concrete: federation enables
– reading other people’s fold-structures – mapping where conversations converge/diverge – discovering pages I would never see otherwise
This is fundamentally impossible in a local-only wiki.
In my own wiki, nothing surprises me except my past self. In the federation, surprises come from everywhere:
– someone forks a forgotten page – someone rewrites it from a different ontology – someone links it to an unexpected storyline
This is how new thinking paths emerge.
I use my wiki as a subjective notebook, but I use the federation as the medium that produces surprises, alignments, and crossings I cannot generate alone. My wiki is the inside; federation gives me an outside. Without the federation, it would be a closed memory; with the federation, it becomes a living conversation.
oppose
This page currently mixes three layers: 1. My (Ralf) self-description (“How I use my wiki… optional structure”) 2. A concrete Q&A with Konrad 3. Meta-notes about Konrad’s positions + Ward’s slogans (as if for my private notebook).
For a public FedWiki page titled “How I Use My Wiki”, (3) feels tacked-on and (2) is a bit too long to live comfortably under that title.
Remove repetition. I say “My personal wiki is a subjective memory system…” twice in slightly different ways.
Tighten the Claim Link Survey paragraph.
Keep the closing “My wiki is the inside; federation gives me an outside.” paragraph.
The meta bit reads like notes-to-self rather than page-story.
This answer is tuned to Konrad’s view of plural ontologies and Ward’s idea that ‘forking is thinking'.
Next: Value of Federation