The Ecology of Your Online Presence
You've been told to build a personal brand. To show up consistently. To create content that positions you as an expert. To optimize your bio, your feed, your messaging.
But what if you're not building a “brand” at all? What if you're tending an ecosystem of thoughts, ideas, and emergence?
Your Ecological Niche
In ecology, every organism has a niche—a unique role it plays within its ecosystem. The dandelion has a niche. So does the bumblebee. So does the clover. Each one contributes something specific, and that contribution serves a specific subset of other organisms within that system.
The dandelion breaks up compacted soil with its deep taproot and provides early spring nectar for pollinators. The bumblebee pollinates plants that other insects can't access. The clover fixes nitrogen in the soil, enriching it for the plants around it.
None of these organisms are trying to serve everyone. None of them are trying to be everything. Yet, they occupy their niche fully, and in doing so, they become essential to the specific web of relationships they're part of.
You have an ecological niche as a business owner, as a healer, as a creator.
You bring a specific medicine that serves a specific subset of people. Not everyone. Not the masses. Your people. And when you try to serve everyone, when you try to make your work palatable to the widest possible audience, you lose the specificity that makes your medicine potent.
The Questions of Ecological digitalism
First, let’s define. What is Ecological Digitalism?
Ecological Digitalism is term coined by writer, Daje Aloh. It is a philosophy and practice of inhabiting digital space while remaining rooted in the body and the earth. It recognizes that our digital lives impact our physical and spiritual (animate) lives, and that our embodied, animate existence enriches our digital presence. Rather than treating digital space as separate from or extractive of "real life," Ecological Digitalism seeks coherent relationship between digitality, physicality, and animism—understanding all three as living, interdependent dimensions of existence.
[ read WHAT IS ECOLOGICAL DIGITALISM? ]
When you start thinking about your online presence as an ecosystem rather than a brand, you begin to ask different questions:
What is my unique medicine, and who does it serve? Not what do I think people want, but what do I actually bring? What transformation happens when people engage with my work? And for whom is this transformation most relevant?
What relationships am I cultivating in this space? An ecosystem is built on symbiotic, interdependent, and mutually nourishing relationships. Who are you in relationship with? Your audience, yes, but also your collaborators, your mentors, the people whose work informs yours. How are these relationships tended?
Where is my energy going, and is it regenerative or extractive? In a healthy ecosystem, energy flows in cycles. There's input and output, give and take. But in extractive systems, energy flows in one direction—out. Are you constantly giving without replenishing? Are you pouring life force into platforms that don't give anything back?
What does sustainability look like for my nervous system? Ecosystems have carrying capacity—a limit to how much they can sustain without collapsing. What's your carrying capacity? How much visibility, how much output, how much engagement can you handle before your system starts to break down?
How do I tend this space so that it can hold life? Tending is different from managing. Tending is relational. It's about paying attention, making adjustments, creating conditions for things to thrive. What does it look like to tend your online presence rather than frantically trying to keep up with it?
The Shift from managing / controlling to Tending
When you think ecologically, you stop trying to manage an “image” and/or be in a constant state of trying to broadcast a message to the masses, hoping it reaches the right people.
Instead, you tend a space. You create conditions. You build relationships. You allow your work to be discovered by the people it's meant to serve, rather than chasing them down with aggressive marketing tactics.
This is a fundamentally different orientation. It's slower. It's more rooted. It requires you to trust that the right people will find you when the conditions are right, not because you went viral, but because your presence in the ecosystem is clear, coherent, and needed.
You Stop Comparing Yourself
One of the most liberating aspects of the ecological lens is that it makes comparison irrelevant.
The dandelion doesn't look at the oak tree and think, "I should be taller." The bumblebee doesn't envy the hummingbird's speed. Each organism occupies its niche, and that niche is essential to the whole.
When you understand your ecological role, you stop scanning for the next best marketing strategy. You stop wondering if you should be doing what that person with 50k followers is doing. You stop second-guessing your approach because someone else's business looks more successful from the outside.
You turn your attention radically to your own path. You ask: What is mine to do? Who am I here to serve? What does my medicine require of me?
And you build from there.
Your Presence Is an Ecosystem
Your online presence—your website, your email list, your content, your offerings, the conversations you host—is an ecosystem. It has its own flow, its own relationships, its own cycles of growth and rest.
When you tend it as such, when you honor the ecology of what you're building, you stop burning out. You stop feeling like you're failing every time a post doesn't perform. You stop measuring your worth by engagement metrics.
Instead, you measure by aliveness. By resonance. By the quality of the connections you're making and the depth of the transformations you're facilitating.
This is what we explore in Worldbuilding School, how to see your business as a living ecosystem and how to build the infrastructure that allows it to thrive without depleting you.
