[tene]

I had a lot of fun in the lojban community back around 2003 - 2010. I attended a few jbonunsla, and that community is where I made the professional connections that lead to me moving to the Bay Area.

During a recent conversation, I realized that a lot of the community dysfunction there is the typical contrarian trap: If you're doing something sufficiently unusual, the vast majority of the people who show up to work on it with you are going to be extremely opinionated contrarians more-interested in personal experimentation than in working to make something solid and accessible to a general audience, and not particularly interested in cooperating or otherwise working together. Most of the people who are interested in pragmatic applications are going to just use something already widely used. The lojban community, when I was active in it, had a huge variety of interesting ideas that nobody was ever following up on or implementing, and the big projects people agreed were important (completing a document standardizing a new version of the language) languished. There were pretty regularly complaints about the community infrastructure (website, wiki, mailing list) that were answered with "If you're passionate about this, please feel free to fix it, or take over running it yourself. I want to hand these off and stop being the only responsible person. I'll give you commit access, root access on the servers, etc." that were almost never actually accepted.

So, basically like almost every open-source project out there. ;)

[sli]

When I was playing with Toki Pona, a surprising amount of people were incredibly resistant to it, sometimes to the point of being upset about it, for... some reason I could never figure out. Never got a straight answer. I found the whole thing really, really bizarre.

Before anyone asks, it wasn't because I was speaking Toki Pona to them. I only speak it to friends that also know it, it's just that sometimes there are other people around.