What to expect from this project

 July 19, 2024

1. What is Chatfic Lab? And what is a chatfic?

Simply put, Chatfic Lab Browser let's you "play" the stories that are written in the style of text message conversations. We call these stories "chatfics".

Messages appear on the screen one by one just like in a chat app or visual novel.

While some stories are not interactive, some stories may force you to make choices that will change the outcome of the story.

The Chatfic Lab is a browser for discovering chatfics hosted in different chatfic servers around the world. It supports the chatfic format (currently v1).

Want to give it a try? Click here to play a fun chatfic story about sherlock holmes.

2. So what is your purpose?

To create an entire ecosystem around chatfics, independent authors and their readers. An ecosystem that is open, decentralised and community powered.

The goal of having a widespread and standardized chatfic format will contribute to the increase of tools and services to be developed around this format. If we grow big enough, other people, other developers, other companies will hopefully embrace the format and its tools. This will result in more chatfics being published everyday by independent chatfic authors.

Authors and models of fanfics usually don't get the love they deserve. Most of the time their stories are stolen, published with no attribution or under different names. This project FIXES THIS. How? 1. Chatfic format makes the author&model attributions and their social media handles an inseparable part of the story file. 2. Chatfic servers allow authors and models to create and host their own stories so that they have full control over their content while keeping it accessible to the entire community. 3. Chatfic Lab Browser shows author information on all screens, shows links to the membership pages(patreon etc) or social profiles of the author and models of the story.

I am working on this for months now, and I was able to spare most of my time working on developing this ecosystem, only because of the support from our community.

If this is the first time you hear about the "chatfic servers" or the "chatfic format", it is because we are in the process of inventing them! The chatfic format can be found here. I've open sourced the chatfic editor that let's you create and edit chatfic stories. And the open source chatfic servers are 𝚘̶𝚗̶ ̴t̴̴𝚑̶𝚎̶ ̴w̴𝚊̶𝚢̶ finally published, again as an open-source project!

I am not done yet, there are lots of things to do. But with your support, we are getting there fast.

3. Why should I support you?

By being a member of our community, and supporting this patreon page and this project, you are not only supporting the Chatfic Lab Browser or getting access to premium features, but also supporting the entire ecosystem of chatfics.

Becoming a patron will let you access premium features of The Chatfic Lab Browser such as removing the wait between messages of a chatfic, customizing character names and avatars, and much more (see tiers).

Patrons will also be able to participate in important polls regarding the future of The Chatfic Lab Browser and other Chatfic Lab related products and features.

What makes The Chatfic Lab different from your generic indie projects on Patreon is that whatever I build, I make it open-source. Which means even if I quit the project one day (never happened with any of my projects, but still), any software developer can just pick up the project from where I left and keep going.

4. What did you manage so far?

During the first few months, hundreds of chatfic stories were published. I have fixed more than 50 bugs, developed almost all requested features including story calendars, fast-forward, character customization, story variables, "next episode" links, tag filters, patreon account linking feature etc. There were a lot of brilliant ideas from our discord community, and I am still working on the ones I didn't already complete.

I published the first stable release of the chatfic format. Introduced model information and author handles. Developed and published the open source chatficdb project (chatfic servers).

I tried to reach out to different authors and recovered many forgotton chatfics with their help. Improved the Chatfic Editor (chatfic story creation tool) and even implemented an OCR feature. Which means you can just drag&drop your chat screenshots and voila, you have a chatfic story in text format!

There are a lot of new features to come! I will not list them here. Because considering this project's speed in general, I would probably need to update this post daily.

This post is an updated version of my first post in this patreon page (as it was outdated). You can access it here and see how far we have come 😅