Part of the original vision for LocalCharts was a skepticism of the traditional ways of accumulating mathematical knowledge about the world (academic publishing), and an idea that there could be an alternative model (hypertextual, social mathematics) that could serve certain goals better (piecing together bits of the world into a locally coherent whole).
The current form of LocalCharts (a discourse server) was predicated on the idea that there was a medium (blog posts that took <2 days to write) which was useful to this goal, and was underserved by either Zulip, traditional publishing, or personal blogs (which have poor discoverability).
In retrospect, probably some of this comes down to laziness and inability to focus on my part, leading to a larger emphasis on the medium that was accessible to me personally than is probably warranted. Also, this came down to a lack of understanding that the slowness of the publishing cycle is somewhat of a feature, because a busy academic generally only wants to read things which have been carefully written and checked.
Men will literally make entire forums instead of writing 20 page papers
I also don’t think that the history of LocalCharts over the last two years shown that a discourse server is an effective way of providing services to people who would like to blog but aren’t technical enough to set up a website, especially not a discourse server which has become somewhat branded as “Owen’s place for random thoughts.” The one success for LocalCharts is essentially as a RSS aggregator for a certain collection of blogs, but I think that this function could perhaps be replaced simply by a “https://localcharts.org/interesting_feeds.txt” file which could be imported into your RSS reader.
So I am considering sunsetting the LocalCharts discourse instance.
I will of course archive all of the posts and comments so that they will be publically available long-term, but perhaps in some format which does not require me to pay for discourse. I will also keep up the LocalCharts forest, and people are still welcome to contribute to that, but I don’t think I will advertise it terribly heavily for the time being.
I still think that there need to be better tools for mathematical collaboration. But:
- It doesn’t seem like “a discourse server run by Owen” is one of them
- I should seriously work at doing traditional collaboration (going to seminars, writing journal papers, writing blog posts on my normal website, reading paper abstracts when they come out on arxiv) before I try again at producing these better tools
- These better tools likely require “deep tech” innovation, like an easy-to-use version control system integrated with forester, aren’t simply a matter of slapping together off-the-shelf technology, and will require a lot of engagement with and feedback from a specific target set of users.