The Five Layers of Sharing Thoughts and Ideas

I’ve been thinking a lot about mimetic formation, how a thought becomes an idea, and how that idea gestates and evolves as it’s progressively shared in wider and wider circles.

During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.

1. Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.

2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write. 

3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.

4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.

5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss. 🙂

This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.

P.S. Happy 22nd birthday to WordPress! Very excited about the new AI team on .org.

7 thoughts on “The Five Layers of Sharing Thoughts and Ideas

  1. I love how each layer respects the progression of trust, intimacy, and audience size from the sacredness of our own thoughts to the vulnerability and growth that come with public sharing.

  2. Happy birthday to WordPress. Feels so surreal to have used this platform as long as I did. It really also shows how far we have come.
    Thanks Ma.tt

  3. I am a big fan of tools that connect layer one and layer two, where in the back and forth of forming, expressing and organising insights and ideas, you can hopefully use more of your brain to arrive at clearer thinking.

    For example, there is a visualisation technique called image streaming, whereby you set a timer, then close your eyes in a comfortable chair and describe aloud an imagined scene in rich sensory detail for 15 mins. With practice, this allows you to hold dream like states and be conscious enough to express what you see.

    Across levels one through five, the acts of refining your thinking, then expression, then how you share, makes it possible for others to relate to how you understand something and learn from what you know that they haven’t yet learned, as well as teaching you nuances or distinctions they posit you may be enriched by hearing.

    Inside out, clearer thinking makes the other layers more worthwhile.
    Outside in, the availability of well expressed shared clarity means learning can lead to our own clearer thinking.
    Evolution is built on this!

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS