hello world

hello everyone, my name is Unity. I am a harm reduction editor and developer that has been active in the space for over 10 years.

I previously was the lead editor and content director of PsychonautWiki.org. For a period of about 5 years, I managed and approved all the site content, including personally writing dozens of articles on established and novel psychoactive substances. I am most proud of the LSD article on PsychonautWiki, which I considered to set the standard for harm reduction content for my generation and has been viewed by millions of people.

When I first joined PsychonautWiki as a staff member, the site had very unique content such as the Subjective Effects Index by Josie Kins. However, it did not have a strong focus on harm reduction and general scientific rigor. I personally take credit for standardizing the doses, durations, and effects for most of the substances the site covered. I also was the primary impetus for research chemical coverage. I am proud of both of these things and the general focus on keeping people safe.

I loved editing for PsychonautWiki and providing people with a site they could trust for reliable substance and psychonautic information. Unfortunately, as I entered my late 20s, I found it increasingly difficult to keep the site up-to-date given the fact it generated 0 revenue, required a ton of time to manage, and an increasing need to pay my bills. As a result, I largely stopped editing and managing the site to focus on my career.

Many community members have noticed that at a certain point the site stopped being updated and feels like an orphan project. This was largely due to my decreasing involvement in the site. Even keeping atop of just approving edits proved burdensome as they would require significant rewrites, citation lookups, and fact checks. Additionally, the platform itself was slow.

With the emergence of AI and LLMs, I came to realize that much of the tedious and burdensome aspects of managing wiki content could be significantly reduced. LLMs are good at writing structured prose and data, as well as reasoning about safety. I realized I could automate many editing tasks and shift my role to doing final reviews, fact checks, and approvals.

So came the idea for Psychedex. I’ve long dreamed about creating a fully modern and advanced version of PsychonautWiki, coupled with a fully functional app. So I decided to give this project a shot. I still don’t know if it will be sustainable in the long run, but I hope that this site will serve as a nexus for all people interested in psychoactive experimentation. If I can even generate some revenue from it via the app, I might be able to do it full time.

I intend this site to not just be a place to read the latest research and data on psychoactive substances and practices, but a central repository of subjective data, trip reports, research papers, and the like. I want to centralize and safeguard everyone’s experiences and also collect and organize cutting-edge data on it. This data will never be for sale but instead available to the public as a universal ledger.

This project should be considered experimental due to extensive usage of novel technology (LLMs). However, all articles are human-reviewed before publication and ultimately rely on the judgment of the editors. I believe my extensive experience manually writing and managing a harm reduction wiki puts me in a good position to run a project like this. I promise I will do my best to produce a true worthy successor to PsychonautWiki.

Now let’s see where this road takes us!

Love,
Unity