[name redacted] created Toki Pona after some years of activity in the Esperanto movement, so the two languages have a shared history. This is also why people miss the point when they complain on these HN threads about Toki Pona apparently not being a full, usable language: there was already Esperanto for that, Toki Pona was intentionally created as an experiment, a sort of conlang Oulipo.
Apparently the creator now goes by that name. I was writing out of my own memories of knowing the person under a previous name in the Esperanto and general conlang community over two decades ago.
