voresky.app

Release 90 is live on voresky.app. Heads up: everyone gets signed out one last time with this update. That's expected. Sign back in, and from now on you stay signed in as long as you keep coming back. Don't make me come looking for you.

Also in this one: Character pages with several content warnings no longer freeze phones. The back arrow takes you back to where you were. Followers and following can be sorted by last post. The path editor has a Find node box. Full list: voresky.app/changelog

2 Mar

Alright. PSA: I'm already very on the fence about gen-AI image slop on Voresky, but if you're using it to impersonate someone else's OC, you're gone. Like, double strike. Don't impersonate other people's OC. At best that's copyright infringement. At worst that's being a ghoul.

voresky.appHow Voresky Works Under the Hood - VoreskyA peek behind the curtain at the architecture powering Voresky, explained for the curious non-programmer.

25 Feb

New blog post up!

voresky.appSlowing down a bit - VoreskyA few updates on where we're at, and what's next.

19 Feb

New blog post up!

voresky.app reposted

Kado the Wisp

@kadoo99.bsky.social

18 Feb

If your character profiles use AI art, how do I know your path descriptions aren’t written by AI as well? Don’t think I’ll be interacting with anymore AI art characters. Please don’t make proposals or poke me if you use AI.

voresky.appVoresky's Inception and Growth - VoreskyThe story of how Voresky began and its journey so far.

18 Feb

Started a blog on Voresky to start discussing things better about what's going on and where I'm going. Feel free to reply here if you want!

Some more thoughts on this one. I went and checked the codebase. I THOUGHT I fully wired up the blocking feature there, turns out I didn't. Sorry. Doing this right now. While it prevents future interactions, it doesn't stop existing ones. That's on me, I missed the mark here. I'll fix it ASAP.

voresky.app@voresky.app

Let's talk about this one, because it feels important. I don't necessarily want to ban people outright, but I want to give more tools to people to address their concerns there. The safeword mechanism seems to have address most of it. Blocking should address the rest, but I need to do better on it.

- The ability to block from Voresky directly. Right now having to go on Bluesky is way too many steps. - Revamped blurred page. You still should be able to access the ellipsis menu to report blocked people, and maybe unblock them. Hopefully, all this should make Voresky better and safer.

One last thing: bans definitely exist inside of Voresky. It's one of the first things that got implemented. I don't want to use it lightly, but it is still on the table. Consent isn't a suggestion in Voresky. Abusers WILL be banned. I'll update the language in the manual and ToS to reflect that.

voresky.app@voresky.app

- No public info about blocks, no notifications. Bluesky by default doesn't show blocks, and Listifications/Clearsky are here to fill this gap if people really want to know. - Moderation logs. I want to be able to keep an eye on people who are repeatedly blocked to potentially detect bad actors.

- A 7 days cooldown. It's okay to change minds and revert blocks. But I don't want it to become a casual mechanism either. Reverted blocks from Bluesky will continue to have effect on Voresky 7 days from the moment the block was detected on Voresky.

voresky.app@voresky.app

I remember why actually: it turns out Bluesky's jetstream is just way too demanding, so now I'm taking a different approach. It should hopefully be equivalent. Now, in terms of design decision: as much as the safeword mechanism is something designed to be a one-off, blocks on Bluesky are nuclear.

People tend to stay blocked forever. Sometimes mistakes happen and blocks are revoked, but not usually. I want Voresky to go above and beyond in terms of mimicking the nuclear aspect of Bluesky blocks. - Detected blocks will nuke everything, without traces. Housing, collars, past interactions...

Mike (Plush Mode)@nudlofshapes.bsky.social

I feel like this at least needs a bit more attention. Dragonus is a must to avoid, especially since they stalked me for 10 years, wanting to Perma me, and get into an IRL relationship, while not giving me a choice

Now the whole idea of Voresky is to just be an overlay on top of Bluesky. It's supposed to respect all of the privacy and moderation decision of it. If there's gaps in it, let me know. That's important. I think I know a few things I need to tighten, and I'll make it a priority.

I need everyone using Voresky to actually feel safe. That's non-negotiable, period.

Mike (Plush Mode)@nudlofshapes.bsky.social

@nudlofshapes.bsky.social

I also don't really want to introduce a "rating" system to Voresky. This feels like it can be abused very easily in my opinion. But the blocking mechanism should really be the solution. There can't be any tolerance for "no cold feet excuse". That's not a thing. Harassment won't be tolerated either

voresky.app reposted

Mike (Plush Mode)

Mike (Plush Mode)@nudlofshapes.bsky.social

Ah great Someone who I've been avoiding found their way onto Voresky Reason I've been avoiding them is that they aim to Perma everyone. They don't care about any limits, they want you permanently. They'll even go to lengths of if they Perma your pet, they'll say they HAVE to perma you too

We've reached the point where I'm going to need some help with Voresky. The immediate matter is to be able to test bug fixes and new features. Instead of always just pushing to production, I have created a staging environment, and I can invite people to it. I have created a Discord server too. 1/2

If you want to help reproduce bugs, test fixes or new features, let me know in DM. I can give you an invitation link to the Discord server, where we'll organize and discuss. This isn't going to be a huge public server, and instead only for the people who actively want to help, at least for now. 2/2

Katja [I will break the chains you fear.] Antares, a 🐈🐉.

In for a penny, in for a pound. Might as well nip this one in the bud. People wanted transparency, Voresky's source code is now available to download with each release at voresky.app/source-code so you can check it up and verify what's going on. I'm bracing for impact on this one, but... Be gentle

voresky.app reposted

@rarf.zone

Checking the profile of some politician or public figure and seeing that they have the "Has Voresky Characters" label,

I HAVE LOWERED THE COST OF RUNNING VORESKY AND I'VE DECREASED THE LATENCY AT LEAST TENFOLD I AM UNSTOPPABLE New projected cost: $120/mo instead of $200/mo Hrrrrrrrrrrr

Alright, Google still doesn't want to give me increased Autopilot quota, so I'll need to change strategy for a minute. I'm going to bring up a new cluster, NOT using Autopilot, and I'll tear down the old one. This unfortunately means everyone will get kicked off their login session as I do so.

Take that, stupid Google quota. Should give us some breathing room now.

11 Feb

PSA: I have been informed that Bluesky app passwords totally work on Voresky. I didn't even think about it. These are easily revoked, so feel free to just use them instead of your actual account password if you don't like the security risk! I'll update the docs accordingly.

Alright, real talk for a moment. I think it's time to... talk about money. Yeah, I know. Honestly, I'm not in there for the money. Like, at all. I'm having fun, that's the point. However, running an infrastructure costs money. NOW, let's be real. Not THAT much money. Thread:

So, in all seriousness: what do I do? I know infrastructure and code very well. But this? Not really. People on Discord are telling me to create an LLC, talking about getting donations. 3k users and counting... ugh. Are we there yet? Should I do that? Comments are very appreciated at this point

PS: I will keep the billing page on there. I'm not kidding. It's here to stay. It's still showing $0 as I'm on the free trial. But whatever happen, I'll keep full transparency about it. You'll see exactly the cost of running Voresky, its data, everything, at all times. My pledge to all y'all.

We're at 3k users now. What? Just... huh. Okay, so, that was the next 10x step. I upgraded the infrastructure. It's now projected to cost me around $200/mo right now. Which I can still handle myself. But. Did you see the growth graph? At this rate, we hit 10k users by the end of the week.

That'd be the next step I'd need to take. For 10k users, the next upgrade would start costing me between $400 and $1k/mo, with a cost that's not too predictable at this point. This would hold me until 100k users, and I seriously can't imagine we'd go that far. But $1k/mo starts to be high for me.

Scaling infrastructure isn't linear. You do this every 10x users basically. Voresky was running on my home machine, until I hit 100 users. Where it started sputtering. So then I moved it to the cloud. Took the lowest tier of scalable hosting, something like $50/mo Worked great, until recently.