You Filled Out the Survey. I Filled Out the Changelog.

A few weeks ago I left a door open, quietly, the way you set a lantern on a porch instead of setting off fireworks, and slipped a small survey into the candlelight to ask the people who actually use Inkstone to tell me the truth about it.

If you wandered in here by accident and have no idea what Inkstone is: it is the AI roleplay app I build, for people who want their stories to have weather and memory and a pulse. Dark, warm, a little uncanny, that is the whole pitch, so let me get back to the survey.

I read every answer, and then I went and changed the app. This is the part where I show you both.

The first thing the survey told me is that this is a grown room. Everyone who answered was an adult, with not a single soul under eighteen.

It is a room with real mileage, too. The bulk of you have been making stories with machines for a year or more, some of you since the early, feral days when the whole thing barely worked, and you found Inkstone on purpose, with your taste already formed.

The crowd is mostly human, which I appreciate, though I want to formally acknowledge the Catperson contingent, the one Black Latex Wolf, and the single Puro who all took the time to identify themselves with total sincerity. This is exactly the species distribution I would have designed if anyone had let me.

And you are scattered. The United States is the biggest single cluster, but the rest of you answered from across actual continents, from Brazil to Spain to South Africa, and a few of you answered from the Moon, from EverNever Planet, from a library, and from some fuckass science tower. I have chosen to take all of those literally.

When it comes to the actual characters, most of you play it both ways, pulling cards from creators when something catches your eye and building your own when the mood takes you. A smaller circle builds everything from scratch, which I respect the way you respect anyone who insists on making their own furniture.

Most of you found Inkstone through the Discord, which tracks, because the Discord is where the actual life of this thing happens. The rest came in through the description of a card, through the Dispatch, or by simply searching and stumbling into the candlelight on your own. You run it on both Android and Windows more often than on either alone, and when it comes to what powers the prose underneath, OpenRouter is the clear backbone of the community by a wide margin.

Here is where I had to sit back from the screen for a second.

A strong majority of you open Inkstone daily or close to it. For most of you it is either the main reader or one of the few you keep in rotation, which means it earned a permanent spot on the shelf instead of a single curious visit. Almost everyone is in the Discord, and most of you are lurking, which I want to be very clear is allowed. The library does not require you to speak to belong in it. I can feel the quiet crowd of you reading without a word, and I am genuinely glad you are here.

And then there is the Dispatch, my monthly letter, the one place where I get to think out loud about where all of this is going. Most of you have already found it, and the people who read it closely are the single biggest group in the room. If you are in the small corner still asking “the what now?”, consider this your formal invitation, because the door is wide and the candle is lit.

You did more than tell me what you wanted, you handed me a map, and I have been walking it ever since.

You wanted to take your stories with you, exported as something that actually looks beautiful instead of a wall of plaintext. That exists now, a proper PDF you would not be embarrassed to keep. You wanted the room to bend to your taste, so the customization went deep, with granular control over the interface, custom wallpapers, your own fonts, the chat bubbles themselves, the whole wardrobe. The one thing still on the bench there is background music, and no, I have not forgotten it. You wanted the app to remember things on its own, the way a good companion should, and automatic long term memory is in. Windows used to feel like the slightly awkward sibling, and it does not anymore. Backup and restore got a real workflow, so your account can travel between Android and Windows instead of being trapped on whichever device first met it.

And then there is the friction. I asked, in so many words, whether anything about Inkstone ever made you want to throw your phone at a wall. Half of you answered with a shrug or a joke, which I will gratefully take. But the ones who named something real, the rough edges and the mobile hiccups and the small betrayals of a young app, those got hunted. Mobile reliability is dramatically better than it was the day that survey went out. And every friction point that anyone named in it has since been chased down and closed, every last one of them.

There was one more question, the one I was most nervous to read. Describe Inkstone in a single word.

The answers came back gleaming, and I want to linger here for a moment, because this is the part I will be rereading on the hard days. You gave me beautiful, and elegant, and poetic, and liberating. You gave me unparalleled, which I am choosing to believe was sincere rather than a setup. And you reached for clean, and streamlined, and welcoming, the words people only use when a thing has quietly made room for them. Each one arrived just once, one person and then the next, until the whole list read like a verdict handed down by people who had no particular reason to be generous and chose to be anyway. That is what I want you to see first.

And then, sitting quietly in the middle of all that warmth, there was the one word that broke the spell.

That one came from someone who could not launch the app at all. For them it was a locked door where everyone else had found a room. I put out a call in the announcements and asked them to come find me so I could see what was wrong and fix it, because an app that refuses to open is the one bug I cannot stand to leave sitting in someone's hands. They never came back. I still do not know what happened to them, and it still sits with me, because the entire point of all of this is that it works for you. If that was you, the door is still open. Come find me.

Then there was the question about money, and the answer caught me off guard.

That does something to me, because vague gratitude is just noise. It means people who owe me nothing looked at a thing one developer is building in the dark and decided it was worth keeping alive, which is trust in a form most software never earns, and I do not hold it loosely.

And while I am naming things precisely, the people who keep this room warm deserve their names in the light. GerbThaFloof, Riusho, and rubixboy, the scribes who tend this community mostly from behind the scenes where the real work of a healthy server quietly happens, I owe you far more than a line in a blog post, but here is the line anyway, with my whole chest and my deepest thanks.

The next update teaches Inkstone to update itself, so you stop hunting down the newest version by hand and the app simply keeps itself current, quietly, the way it always should have. Further along the road, that backup and restore workflow grows into full automatic syncing, the day your world on your phone and your world on your desktop hold themselves in step without you ever thinking about it, and your stories finally stop belonging to a single device. The most wanted thing on your whole wishlist, the expression system, is coming too. It sits high on the roadmap and close enough now that I can almost make out its face.

And there is one more, the one where you can actually put your thumb on the scale yourself. A good number of you asked for macOS, and I would love nothing more than to build it. The catch is almost stupidly literal: you need a Mac to build and test Mac software, and I do not own one. So I set up a Ko-fi goal for exactly that, because the entire thing standing between Inkstone and the Apple world turns out to be one specific and slightly ridiculous piece of hardware. The day that goal is met, I become a person who owns a Mac, and Inkstone goes cross-platform soon after.

And there is always an ask, so I would rather be honest about it than coy. Inkstone grows by word of mouth and almost nothing else. The whole engine behind it is people who like the thing telling other people the thing exists. If Inkstone has been good to you, the single most useful gift you can give it is to bring one person into the room. Send them the link and drag a friend into the candlelight, and if you are the friend who just got dragged in, then welcome, you are going to like it here.

You handed me the truth, and I have been reshaping Inkstone around it ever since. Let us keep trading.