haiku.garden — the plan, and where we actually are

Back in January we wrote a short pitch for what haiku.garden should be. The short version: haiku.garden is an experiment in digital gardening by the Naviar Haiku community — a personal data server (PDS) on ATProto that becomes the home for your identity and your data, instead of renting space on somebody else's platform. Handle format name.haiku.garden. Portable, yours, ours to maintain together.

The name comes from bento (弁当) — the Japanese lunch box, an artfully divided meal where the arrangement itself is a form of care. "Bento grid" is also the UI pattern it lent its name to: content in mismatched tiles, structured but not uniform. Both meanings apply. haiku.garden is meant to hold a community's different kinds of work — haiku, music, whatever else Naviar makes — in one visually coherent, unevenly-shaped space, prepared with the same attention bento implies.

The original plan had five seasons:

Single user — register the domain, stand up a one-person PDS, land on naviar.haiku.garden.

Multi-user — at.haiku.garden, member pages, modeled on at.aesthetic.computer.

Community tools — learn from how at.aesthetic.computer and loves.bruessels do it, start including AI transcripts to document the creative process itself.

Atmospheric.Computer — push on ATProto UX and affordances generally.

Atmospheric.Reviews — modular reviews, built for poetic and creative computing communities.

Here's the honest update: we didn't do it in that order. Season 1 and Season 2 collapsed into each other. Rather than build one showcase site (naviar.haiku.garden) first and add multi-user support later, we went straight to a real multi-user PDS — every member gets their own name.haiku.garden identity from day one, not just a slot on a shared page. And instead of a hand-built showcase, every new member's first profile now gets built for them automatically — a themed bento page via blento.app, populated the moment they verify their account, with a Bluesky feed, embeds for plyr.fm or Bandcamp, whatever fits their kind of work. Musician, haiku poet, general community member — different themes, same idea: you shouldn't have to build your own bento box before you can use the kitchen.

give.to.haiku.garden — the sustainability piece, payment integration to keep this running — is still just an idea, not built. Season 3 through 5 are still ahead of us, mostly as originally imagined.

So: the shape changed, the destination didn't. If you're reading the shorter devlog entries that follow this one, this is the plan they're checking in against.