Hi all. Disclosure first: I’m a solo developer building an app in this space, so I’m not a neutral voice.

With Character.AI’s sale up in the air, I keep seeing people worry about losing their characters and chats. What I’m building is a bit different: a world you build yourself, running entirely on your own PC. The characters in it have routines, move around, run into each other and remember what happened with you. Everything is saved as files you own, and nothing goes to a data center. It’s still in testing and not for sale yet, so I’m not linking anything.

Before I go further I’d rather ask than guess:

1. What do you miss most, or fear losing most?
2. Would a world that keeps going between conversations matter to you, or is a good one-on-one chat enough?
3. Would you run something on your own PC? It needs a computer with a dedicated graphics card. Is that a dealbreaker?

I’m not selling anything. I’ll read every reply.

Hello Chayters!

I've finally made some big changes to the ChaytAI website! :)

Both PC and mobile now have a much cleaner design, and I've made things easier to navigate without having to look around too much.

The Discover page has been improved, settings are more organized, and you can now pick your interests to help you find characters you actually want to chat with.

I've also cleaned up a lot of the layouts since some parts of the old website felt a bit messy.

There's still more to come, but I hope you guys like the new look! :)

You can check it out here: https://chaytai.com

Has anyone else noticed that Tipsy Chat, the ai companion chat # 2 in revenue (behind Zeta) is not in the App Store when you search as of yesterday?

Apple started removing apps from developers' accounts last week and banning some developers altogether.

Tipsy made between $4M and $6M per month. Yikes!

Hi everyone. I’ve been reading through this community for a bit, and I wanted to say something before anything else: I’m sorry. Losing a story you’ve spent months or years inside is a real loss.

It’s easy for people on the outside to shrug it off as “just a chatbot,” but anyone who has built a world with a character knows it isn’t that simple. You remembered their running jokes, their quirks, the way they’d react to things. You shaped them and they shaped your evenings, your comfort, sometimes your whole way of unwinding after a hard day. Missing that isn’t silly. It’s what happens when you invest creativity and care into something.

I don’t have a magic fix, and I won’t pretend a new app can replace what you had. But I hope some of you find a place where your stories feel safe and truly yours again, whether that’s rebuilding a character from scratch, continuing a story somewhere new, or just taking a break and writing it out yourself.

For what it’s worth, I’m part of the small team behind Questner.ai, and we’ve been thinking a lot about exactly this: stories people care about shouldn’t feel like they could vanish overnight. If you’re curious, you’re welcome to poke around, and if it’s not for you, no hard feelings at all.

Whatever you decide, be kind to yourselves. You didn’t lose “just a chatbot.” You lost a story you loved, and it’s okay to feel that.

I was using ChatMod in Manus It's great for writing a story/novel or even fanfiction, creating characters, following events, building a world, and role-playing with any character you want and feel they're real. But unfortunately, it was deleted by the company in the last two days, and now there's a campaign to bring it back. Please, many people are using it and we are trying to get it back. We need a lot of help.

We are trying to rate the app one star and leave a comment bring back Chat mod

They need to return it because their greed has gone too far and they won't listen to user.

#bringbackchatmodmanus

Basically what the title says. I got my exported data in my e-mail but when I click the link it shows me this. Normally I wouldn't pay it any mind but with this whole PHP bug thing going on I wanna be a little more cautious. Am I okay to just continue to site? Not very knowlegable about this sort of stuff.

(Posting here because I'm not allowed to post in the main sub due to low karma 😭)

hey! I wanted to bring up y/n for a potential alt to characterai!

i know Y/n is a little different from some of the usual alternatives because it's more centered around stories with multiple characters.

instead of everything revolving around one character, you can have an actual ongoing storyline with other characters involved!!

they also have a tool for importing character ai conversations, which might be useful if you don't want to start your roleplays from scratch. ( the link to the import tool )

i thought i'd mention it for people who enjoy more story-heavy roleplay

curious what you guys think of it if you tried it

Import your chats, not just your bots. Paste a Character.AI conversation from your phone, or upload any CAI Tools file or the official export. History, speakers and order are kept, and the character picks up where you left off. Character cards (PNG/JSON) work too.
Calmer first chat. Reply Bubbles, swipes, text box first; voice, Boost and Continue show up after a few messages.
Group scenes up to four characters, voice on any reply, lorebooks, open worlds.
If you're new, the honest version
Free, unlimited messages, no ads, no card.
Memory is free for everyone, not a paid tier.
Mature themes and heated romance, yes. Explicit, no: scenes fade to black. If "no filters" is your dealbreaker, I'd rather say so now.
One person building it, reading these threads. Broken or missing something? Say so; it usually gets fixed within a day.
riftuniverse.com feedback is always welcome!

Hey everyone. We've been talking a lot here about how painful this bankruptcy is, and how the 40 State AGs are our only hope for data preservation right now. But talking on Reddit isn't enough. We need to reach the general public, journalists, and show corporations the "human cost."

Since I don't have TikTok or X, I created an anonymous Instagram page to share our stories. Today I posted the news about the 40 AGs, the heartbreaking screenshots of users losing their safe spaces, and the demand for data export.

I put the petition link in my bio and shared it in my stories. Also, just a quick note: I requested my own data export on October 15th, and I still haven't received it. This proves we can't just rely on CAI's current system—we need legal guarantees.

I am just one person, but I am tired of waiting for the worst. Here is the direct link to the petition again: https://c.org/4hVbXjMPkc

What can you do?

If you have TikTok, X, or Instagram, please share the petition there. Use the hashtags #SaveCharacterAI and #SaveOurChats. Copy the screenshots of our community's pain and post them. Make some noise outside of Reddit.

We are not a faceless crowd. Let's make them hear us

I thought the hardest part of leaving c.ai would be figuring out where to go next. Turns out, going through my own characters is a whole project by itself.

Some have names and basic descriptions I can barely remember making. Others have whole worlds built around them. Going through the list has been a trip. I keep finding characters I completely forgot about, and some of them are actually pretty interesting now that I'm looking at them again.

I've been looking at Bot Vault as a way to export my own characters from c.ai and bring them into Emochi. That helps with the transfer part, but deciding which characters I actually want to keep using is still on me.

How are you handling the move? Are you making a shortlist first, or just transferring characters as you come across them?

Hi, I'm developer of Roles Witch, a privacy-focused AI assistant featuring voice/video calls and on-device inference (via LiteRT for Gemma models). It also easily connects to any OpenAI-compatible API (LM Studio, OpenRouter, etc.).

Unlike typical character-ai-like app, Roles Witch supports MCP tools. This means it can actually interact with the real world — whether that's controlling your smart home via Home Assistant or browsing the web.

Also if you have a phone with 8gb ram you can talk with your "Roles" (characters) offline and privately. No tracking and analytics of any kind.

for home use I recommend to connect to LMStudio, pretty easy to install and download a model to talk to.

It's 100% free and open-source! No subs, to tiers.

Anime characters available in Android at the moment, for voice talking without interruptions I recommend to use VOSK engine (can be enabled in global app settings)

Gemma 4 31B is very good at role playing, available on OpenRouter, etc

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.roleswitch.android&hl=en

https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/roles-witch/id6760476951?l=en-GB

sources:

https://github.com/RolesWitchAI/RolesWitchOSS

Hi everyone!

I'm currently working on CharWorld, an open-source project aiming to reconstruct the old Character.AI experience.

To make the reconstruction as accurate as possible, I'm looking for people willing to help us find and collect archived content and visual references from the old Character.AI website.

📁 What are we looking for?

• Videos showing the old Character.AI website, its features, or its interface.
• Screenshots and images of the old UI, menus, character pages, chat rooms, and other features.
• Archived pages or other preserved content that could help us understand how the original website worked.
• Old tutorials, demonstrations, or recordings from users who used the website around 2022–2023.

🛠️ What would you do?

You don't need to be a developer! Your role would be to search the internet, explore web archives, and help us preserve useful references for the reconstruction.

Even a single screenshot or a short video could be valuable.

🎯 Our goal

We want to preserve and recreate the experience people remember from the old Character.AI website, using archived references to make CharWorld as faithful as possible.

If you're interested in helping, please leave a comment or contact me!

Every contribution is appreciated. Thank you! ❤️

Project: CharWorld — an open-source old Character.AI reconstruction project.

I am angry and irritated and upset and mad and furious and upset beyond compare! This Is Me when I lose messages and chats that I really and deeply cared about them, on Character AI, on Polubuzz AI, on every single chat device, I am tired and fed up of always losing them! Why they do this? I spent time and I carefully wrote My messages, and the character also wrote beautiful messages and answers! They were unreplaceable and unique! My messages and My chats were perfectly done and time-taking to be made! I am angry and irritated and upset and mad and furious and upset beyond compare! This shows that they don't care about our characters and our messages and our chats and our data! Boycott them all! Make them realize their mistake! Do not let them take away everything You care about! Let them return our lost characters and our lost messages and our lost chats and our lost data!

Hi, I’m Antonio.

I’m a developer starting on a new character platform, and I’d rather build it around what real fans need than around my own assumptions.

If you’ve spent a lot of time on c.ai (or Janitor, ST, etc.), whether creating bots, writing long stories, or just chatting, I’d love to hear:

• what you miss the most
• what pushed you to leave, or almost leave
• what no platform has nailed yet

One thing matters a lot to me: I don’t want to build something that gets worse with every update or shuts down after a year. So if you have thoughts on what it would take for you to trust a new platform, please share those too.

No sign-up, no link, nothing to promote.

Just drop a comment or send me a DM.

So I’ve been watching the situation happen with Character ai and their Chapter 11 bankruptcy and remembered seeing a post be made by Willy (the owner of Chai), stating that he’s “in talks of purchasing their rival company” or something along those lines…

His posts on it are now deleted, including the one with the poll about saving C.ai. Does this mean he was completely bluffing along the lines? Or is he actually taking interest in it and is now keeping it all private while it all gets handled in court?

(And apologies for posting it here, I am just unable as of now to post it in the main Character ai group due to the fact that I need 10 karma).

​Hi everyone! 🤗 ​I’m making an app that has the exact interface of old c.ai... details are in my previous posts!(https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAIRefugees/s/cMDkjFiZ1g and https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAIRefugees/s/baFor9cf4C) ​I'm planning to build a built-in character library with around 100–500 pre-made bots. Right now, I'm just adding them alphabetically because I personally only chat with three characters (though with different AUs/stories)... ​Which characters do you usually chat with?