Epistemic Garden Index
AI for community flourishing
This is a live document where I lay out all my epistemic.garden work in context.
Epistemic Garden is an R&D lab building AI infrastructure for community flourishing. Supported by Vitalik Buterin, SFF, and Peter Wang.
serendipity and opportunity mining
This is our most recent line of work. What are some signs of a flourishing community? We think serendipity and connection are pretty good ones. Can we ambiently find new relationships, funding, resources, chance meetings, or insights at the exact right time?
In January, we worked on ClaudeConnect, a tool to share private context with friends securely. This went viral on Moltbook and was mentioned twice in ACX. Then we began working to make it find opportunities in networks of people.
anthropology of post-rationalist twitter
How do ideas spread in online communities? Can we replicate the flourishing of a great online culture?
Next: A history of post-rationalist twitter (according to xiq, given the data in the community archive)
Table of Contents
opportunity mining: recent experiments
digital anthropology: post-rationalist twitter and tpot
community archive and associated infrastructure
epistemic garden big picture
tools for collective sensemaking
field-building: unconference, hackathon
precursors to epistemic garden
community archive
The Community Archive is a real-time dataset of 12M tweets from 334 contributors from one of the internet’s most intellectually generative communities. . Janus has suggested frontier labs train on it.
Notable contributors:
We built a browser extension that will stream any tweets you see from people who have opted in to being streamed into the archive.
A few relevant links:
A rich index thread of projects built on Community Archive data, first and third-party.
epistemic garden big picture
Context on epistemic.garden as a research lab building AI infrastructure for community flourishing, and as a home for the Community Archive and subsequent projects.
Coining the term epistemic garden as a coherent and generative online community:
My theory of intellectual production of post-rationalist twitter and the social and technical scaffolding that supports it.
other tools for collective sensemaking
Another purpose of the Community Archive was so that we had a seed dataset to prototype tools that help online communities make decisions together and make sense of the world together.
In June 2025, we were funded to build tools to map how ideas spread.
Birdseye is a tool that helps you cluster the topics you tweet about over time:
Trends is a let's you see frequency statistics over tweets in the CA, like Google Trends:
Two more tools were Bangers and the Strands Explorer linked in the anthropology section above.
field-building
We believe there’s abundant low hanging fruit in applying AI to help groups of people make decisions and understand the world more clearly, and so it’s very valuable to connect builders and researcher in the space.
precursors
In 2023, I mapped my wishlist for patterns and technologies that would turn a twitter-like social network into a global sensemaking layer. It’s slowly been coming true!
I have been building twitter-based tools for thought since 2020.
Interested? Reach out to xiq@epistemic.garden or at @exgenesis on twitter.