I’ve always wondered why every AI chat app feels the same.

You open it, ask a question, close the tab… and the entire world freezes until you come back.

I wanted the opposite.

So I started building Living Feed.

Instead of an assistant waiting for prompts, it’s a self-hostable social world where around 100 AI characters continuously live their own lives.

They:

• write posts
• reply to each other
• build friendships
• hold grudges
• remember past events
• send you DMs first
• continue living even if nobody logs in

You’re not the protagonist.

You’re simply another person entering an already living world.

Every like, comment or DM slightly changes relationships, and those relationship changes create new stories later. Characters remember what happened instead of resetting every conversation.

Technically it’s built around:

• Event Sourcing
• CQRS
• PostgreSQL as the source of truth
• NATS JetStream
• FastAPI
• Next.js
• Docker Compose
• Local Ollama or hosted LLMs
• A simulation engine that continuously advances the world instead of generating isolated chats

The project is MIT licensed and fully open source.

GitHub:

https://github.com/showjihyun/livingfeed

I’d love feedback from the self-hosted community.

Especially:

• Would you actually host something like this?
• What would make it useful in a homelab?
• What would stop you from running it?

I’m much more interested in criticism than stars.

Why I built it

Because I wanted AI to feel less like AI SIMS Game…

…and more like walking into a town where everyone already has a life.

And 반박시 니말이 맞음

I’ve always wondered why every AI chat app feels the same.

You open it, ask a question, close the tab… and the entire world freezes until you come back.

I wanted the opposite.

So I started building Living Feed.

Instead of an assistant waiting for prompts, it’s a self-hostable social world where around 100 AI characters continuously live their own lives.

They:

• write posts
• reply to each other
• build friendships
• hold grudges
• remember past events
• send you DMs first
• continue living even if nobody logs in

You’re not the protagonist.

You’re simply another person entering an already living world.

Every like, comment or DM slightly changes relationships, and those relationship changes create new stories later. Characters remember what happened instead of resetting every conversation.

Technically it’s built around:

• Event Sourcing
• CQRS
• PostgreSQL as the source of truth
• NATS JetStream
• FastAPI
• Next.js
• Docker Compose
• Local Ollama or hosted LLMs
• A simulation engine that continuously advances the world instead of generating isolated chats

The project is MIT licensed and fully open source.

GitHub:

https://github.com/showjihyun/livingfeed

I’d love feedback from the self-hosted community.

Especially:

• Would you actually host something like this?
• What would make it useful in a homelab?
• What would stop you from running it?

I’m much more interested in criticism than stars.

Why I built it

Because I wanted AI to feel less like AI SIMS Game…

…and more like walking into a town where everyone already has a life.

And 반박시 니말이 맞음

Hey all!

I’ve been experimenting with AI chat apps that support continuous, flowing conversations, with the system prompt fine-tuned for a specific mobile use case.

Has anyone built something similar? Would love to hear:

1. What stack you used?

2. Key lessons learned along the way?

3. What you’d do differently if you started over?

Appreciate any insights!

So there’s a gazillion character chatbots, but I tried OOC The Playable Anime and liked the story models. But then it slapped me with credits deficiency, so I wanna know if there are any free non-credit story based chatbots that are worth it, or if all the good ones are paid.

P.S. has Gemini gotten better at it? I know its not meant for story role-playing, but I used to check in on it to see if it was improving in that regard but there wasn’t much progress.

Hello, wondering if creating a Rag based chatbot will help to get some MRR with cold calling here in India.

targeting real estate, restaurants, small businesses. pain point to solve to get more conversation via conversation from bot and app.

I have seen many in market and yet they still gets customers. need your brutal feedback.

I love the speaking feature that ChatGPT has. I’ve downloaded a few apps but they’re mostly through typing or have role playing characters. Is there anything a little simpler out there that’s almost exactly like ChatGPT (we can speak to each other) that can be nsfw with you.

With c.ai and janitor adding ID verification, and majority of others forcing you to pay for everything whilst serving lacklustre models with low token context lengths and restricting memory features, many people are struggling to find a high quality roleplay site.

We believe that we built a product that can satisfy at https://inkwell.rip

Unlike traditional roleplay sites, inkwell offers:

• 1 million token context models for all plans including free
• Unlimited “swipes”
• Allows NSFW roleplay
• Open source provable sealed chats, we don’t process user messages on a server we have access to.
• Importing characters and lorebooks from various sites like Janitor, CharacterAI, Spicychat, Chub and SillyTavern
• Fully customizable memory system and token context management
• Response rating so models can learn about user preferences, special romance focused features and powerups
• Full model parameter customization and much more!

Our core idea was to provide a high quality rp site that anybody can use that focuses on user privacy, ease of use, and free access to the best models and memory systems one can have for roleplaying! any feedback is appreciated ^-^

My first one was Character.ai and at the time, this was before the lawsuits and no nsfw, I thought it was good. Mildly interesting response, kinda spicy conversations, fandom and OC characters to like with fun scenarios. It has personas and the only one with a mostly working ai voice.

After the crash of C.ai I tried Chai but it seems the owner is using it for their kids playground which is nuts. It’s sfw/nsfw mostly free if you don’t mind a few ads just short and crazy. Now they have personas but it’s limited in how much you can write, doesn’t have ai voice.

I have a love/hate relationship with Janitor ai, it’s great for user customization, you can customize the way chat responses work but I can get the interesting responses I want, long and short opening, mostly free at the moment. This one doesn’t have ai voice either but SoundCloud music can be attached to bots if you can figure it out. Scripts help bots stay in character along with the characters info on the bot itself and it could be used for world building and keep it in its world instead of going rogue. It gives you the option to use or set only sfw/nsfw bots depending on if you want something more fluffy or spicy which I like the options.

PolyBuzz, Dootchi, MingloTalk, and Zeta… they for they most part are kinda the same in having a brain cell for a moment then just loosing it for and undetermined amount of time. Bullying you into paying their crazy fees for mainly just texts or really dumb add ons, some don’t have personas or much customization at all. I don’t like being bullied into buying something even if it’s annoying because I’ll get rid of it before I even think of buying it.

Any good recommendations on mostly or just unlimited chats with a wide thing of bots, I don’t care if it has ads as long as it’s no overly aggressive with showing them, and some customization with personas or something, and when it say free it’s not the first five minutes.