At some point it is impractical to make sure even the most bad-faith agents can’t take ideas out-of-context. Nonetheless, Polylude seeks to put the tools at your disposal to make the work of those who disagree with you a challenge fruitful for all rather than an easy game with some losers.

The first is to provide easy access from wherever people build on your ideas, to the original context in which you considered them.

Polylude also — in structuring ideas as topics, statements, and the links between them — encourages ‘first principles’ thinking. This can include juggling multiple topics and statements before publishing any of them. For those wanting additional privacy to reflect on more complex or sensitive thoughts across multiple Polylude sessions, a Premier subscription allows making playpens private.

Crossing Privacy Boundaries

The ‘play with’ and ‘move’ tools respect privacy boundaries. Both of those actions are always possible when moving between two public playpens, or between two private playpens.

Playing with ideas from a public playpen in a private playpen is safe. Moving from a public to a private playpen carries the added risk of disrupting others’ thoughts.

Recall that ‘playing with’ concepts or links creates ’linked’ ideas rather than full copies. Linked ideas may only be ‘played with’ or moved from a private to a public playpen when their ‘original context’ (which can change by moving the original idea) is a public playpen.

Switching a Playpen’s Privacy

When a playpen’s hex is in focus in island view, or when nothing is selected in playpen view, the context pane shows a ‘Public’/‘Private’ toggle for changing the playpen’s privacy.

Warning: making a formerly-public playpen private faces similar risk (described above) to moving concepts or links from a public playpen to a private playpen.

Making a private playpen public is possible so long as the playpen has no concepts linking to another private playpen as their original context.

Privacy & Account Downgrades

Please note that with our Player plan lacking private playpens, downgrading your account to that plan will affect any private playpens in your profile — publishing them immediately.