Orphaned Comments Container
During the switchover to LW2.0, one post that was posted during or close to the migration didn’t make it into the new DB, but some of its comments did. This post is here to have somewhere to move comments that wound up without an invalid post ID.
In general, building infrastructure for the rationalist community to interact is cool and I approve of it; for this particular one, there are questions about using lesswrong as a brand name if it’s not affiliated with LW itself. (For example, the Facebook group that used to be called “LessWrong” eventually got renamed to Brain Debugging Discussion at Eliezer’s request.)
Hi, I know you mean well but can you maybe talk to existing people about efforts before doing something like a huge declaration. False rallying flags are just going to confuse everyone.
It would probably be difficult to be clear on who to ask but as far as I can tell you didn’t even try before posting.
I do want to heap heavy praise on the OP for Just Going Out And Trying Something, but yes, consult with other projects to avoid duplication of effort. :)
(I believe the person to talk to would be Vaniver.)
The obvious way to ask would be open a discussion on LW and ask for feedback.
Having a new website in the control of a person who’s no estasblished member of the community (karma<100) also seems problematic.
Agreed, it seems pretty unhelpful to start this kind of project without consulting the founders and administrators of LessWrong because of:
risk of desensitizing people to announcements about the LW community
risk of further splintering the LW community
missing out on good ideas from LW’s founders and administrators
maintaining a good working relationship with LW administrators
getting consent to use the LW brand at all
etc etc etc
Similarly to what others have said, it seems pretty unhelpful to start this kind of project without consulting the founders and administrators of LessWrong because of:
risk of desensitizing people to announcements about the LW community
increasing splintering of the LW community
missing out on good ideas from LW’s founders and administrators
maintaining a good working relationship with LW administrators
having consent to use the LW brand at all
etc etc etc
Me and Sam Deere actually built an almost fully functional LaTeX formatting pipeline for LW posts during a hackathon once. Getting that up and running wouldn’t be very hard.
The description on the landing page of lesswrong.io is:
But that sounds like it could be a description of lesswrong.com. Is lesswrong.io intended to be a replacement for lesswrong.com? If so, is there a plan for deprecating lesswrong.com and migrating the user base over to lesswrong.io? If not, is seems to me that having two different forums with the same purpose could actually splinter rather than revitalize the community.
Are there any suggestions for what sorts of discussions the io site is for vs what sorts of discussions the .com site is for?
Nope. There is a plan underway to migrate lesswrong.com to a new codebase, but it’ll be similar to Reddit / Hacker News (i.e. much the same) instead of Twitter / Mastodon.
Mastodon is supposed to be a Twitter replacement. As such, it has a 500-character limit on posts, so it will be difficult to hold complicated discussions there.
Also, it’s the Twitter-is-dying-let’s-all-go-over-there flavour of the month thing.
Ah—got it.
To avoid splintering the community, my suggestion would be that if someone wants to make a <500 character post, they could just make in on lesswrong.com, perhaps on open thread. After all, we don’t have a minimum post length.
While I echo people’s concerns, I wanted to add another voice on top of ThoughtSpeed’s saying “praise for actually doing something.”
As far as i am aware, it doesn’t matter too much which Mastadon / Fediverse server you put your account on; you can still participate in the microblogging community. Under this assumption, if you want to connect with other microblogging aspiring rationalists, feel free to post your username as a reply to this comment.
I am @alexpear@social.targaryen.house
Congratulations on actually doing something!
Let’s test how this works, and if there are complaints, we can address them later. (Including the possible change of ownership; hey, the platform is open-source.)
You might want to have a look at https://diasporafoundation.org/