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Hello! Wow what a nice welcome message, thanks :)
Yup from Lesswrong, nope don't know me.
I love your stories by the way, they were my introduction to the site and still have not been topped IMO.

Welcome to fimfiction! From LessWrong, I guess. Do I know you?

I oughta write an "intro to fimfiction" blog post to link new people to. But since I haven't...

"fimfiction" is more-or-less divided into 2 big groups, one being people who read & write stories, the other being people who hang out together all day on knighty's Discord server. There seems to be little overlap between these groups.

The people who read & write are divided into groups around different kinds of stories, like porn, romance, fluff romance, adventure, comedy, dark/horror/gore, and "literary". These groups have some overlap, but less than I expected.

The best way I know to find the kinds of stories that I like is to read the posts by Seattle's Angels (links to them here), and the stories in the Royal Canterlot Library. The RCL admits only one story per writer (with the lone exception of GhostOfHeraclitus, who has 2). The Seattle's Angels posts usually show up as site posts, but lately Wanderer_D posts them, so you can also find new ones by following him.

The selection process for both is multi-level: anybody can recommend a story (but not their own stories); others can second recommendations; a review group picks the stories with the most or best recommendations; 2-5 reviewers read the final choices and then write reviews. It works better than agents and publishers IMHO.

Readers can also be categorized by level of interaction. About half of all registered users never interact with anyone else--they don't follow anyone, no one follows them, and they rarely if ever comment on a story. The degree of interaction has a power-law distribution, which I made a graph of, but am too hurried to find and post now. So there's like 1000 users who make half of all the comments.

Fanfic at the low-interaction end is just a way to read stories about a particular story-world. At the high-interaction end, the community is more important than the fiction, Or, rather, it's a communal reading of fiction, without any sharp division into readers and writers. It is to print publishing as playing baseball for fun is to getting season tickets to watch professionals play. Part of the fun is diving into the slush pile in the hopes of finding a diamond.

It's also gamified writing. Counting your followers, the number of reads and favorites your stories get, getting onto the "featured box"--it can be like a video game, or like developing a character in D&D. Addictive, but in a way that drives you to be a better writer.