Like the tagline says, it's a playground to get lost in while daydreaming. Conworlding, worldbuilding for its own sake rather than to accompany other media like books or games, has been a hobby of mine since I was little. Kids make up elaborate imaginary worlds, and I just started documenting mine as I grew up.
This particular conworld emerged from a very stressful time in my life. Among other things, I was coping with the aging and eventual passing of my retired guide dog, and I was struggling, and continue to struggle, with a lot of heavy existential and spiritual questions. Honestly, I'm also kind of lonely.
This project is in many ways self therapy for me. It reflects my personal interests, as well as my melancholy, anger, and fear. Combined with the fact I am not and have no aspirations of becoming an artist or writer, I don't expect this stuff to be to most people's taste, or even be competent by any objective measure.
If you visited the previous site and found it compelling enough to return, I'm grateful. I initially chose Mediawiki because it's the wiki. You've at least read a Wikipedia article, if not edited one. The most popular wiki farms like Fandom and Miraheze are based on Mediawiki, and many independent wikis like the Homestar Runner Wiki, Transformers Wiki, and the various wikis in the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance use Mediawiki. I figured it's everywhere for a reason.
It's the easiest on the eyes by far in terms of free and open source options. The default skin is clean and well put together. It's designed around the idea that you write first and organize later, with order emerging out of chaos as ideas develop. This mirrors how I worldbuild, and how I think in general.
However, it's a pain to manage. It requires a database, which has its own server and associated credentials. I used sqlite for the database, which is much easier to manage than the expected MariaDB, but if the site breaks I can't browse or convert content easily.
DokuWiki is much easier to admin. It does not use a database at all. Articles are stored as plaintext files which can be read, edited, and backed up even if the server dies. Mediawiki is designed to be completely open. There are no access controls beyond write-protecting pages. You can even edit other people's comments on talk pages! If you search for access control extensions on the Mediawiki wiki (say that five times fast) There are copious repeated warnings that Mediawiki was not designed to limit access, and you really shouldn't use such extensions.
As for why I want access control, I want to combine all my work on this project into one place. I have rough ideas, drafts of stories, and other such works in progress that I'm not ready to show off. I previously used an Obsidian vault for this, but I also want to be able to browse previous versions of a document, which Obsidian doesn't offer. DokuWiki has a version history. So I can put my rough drafts behind a private namespace and migrate content out to the public when I feel it's ready.
I haven't necessarily stopped posting there, I just don't want to step on other people's toes. Mediawiki (which Frath uses) does not allow easy namespace creation. Everyone's ideas have to share the same namespace. If your conworld has elves, and you want to write about your elves, you have to give the article a unique title that doesn't clash with everyone else's article on their version of elves. Yes I know Wikipedia has a similar problem, and uses disambiguation pages to solve it, but I think it's an inelegant solution when everyone's playing in their own sandbox.
Creating namespaces in DokuWiki is trivial, just name the article :new_namespace:new_article and it's automatically created. A site like Frath that's all about people showing off their conworlds and conlangs would greatly benefit from having non overlapping namespaces. Everyone could have their own namespace, so your article on elves could be :your_conworld:elves, and another person's article on their elves could be :their_conworld:elves.
But I'm new to Frath and didn't feel it was my place to try and upset any apple carts. I also have the skills to admin my own server, so I did just that.
Your mom is ugly. Also That's not a question. It's not ugly it's dated. There's a difference. The default DokuWiki template was created in 2012, and reflects the design sensibilities and technical needs of the time. Yes other, seemingly prettier templates exist, but they all of dusty little corners that don't work, such as black text on a black background. I would rather have a dated site I know won't break than a pretty site that has janky corners.
For now, no. This is my personal project.
I originally intended this site to be an instance of nodeBB to serve as a place on the Fediverse for conlang and conworld discussion. But the conlanging community is so small that I didn't want to fragment it even further. The community is served well by the CBB, ZBB, FrathWiki, etc. I've already complained about Mediawiki, and I'd love the forums to move away from phpBB, but changing platforms would result in a massive loss of history. Also, The Lonely Galaxy is a constructed world, so the name fits.
Short answer, no. I do think the conlanging community would be well served by a single site that acted as both a discussion platform and a place to showcase and document people's projects long term. That was part of why I bought this domain. The ideal platform would be a wiki forum combo. Like a forum, it would have robust discussion and moderation tools. Like a wiki, it would allow users to create pages, show backlinks, track version history, wanted and orphaned pages, etc.
Something like Bookstack is very close to what I want. It even has a WYSIWYG editor by default (not every conlanger is a techie comfortable writing markup), but while it does have a comments section under each page, there's no browsable user list, private messages, or easy way to moderate discussions. You can't link to nonexistent pages, either. It also isn't meant to scale horizontally.
There is a project called Storyden that seems to be exactly what I'm looking for, but it's very early in development. It also leans into AI, which many people including myself are not comfortable with.