u/BuilderGuyAI

Upfront: I built this, so this is a self-promo post I guess.

I work in the AI/LLM space (finetuning, harnesses, some open-source), and the companion apps I used kept dying on the same two things: the character forgets everything after a while, and the good parts always end up paywalled by a company you know will squeeze you later.

So I built Nodera.ai, now in free web early access so you cant even spend money even if you wanted to. What it does differently:

📲 Swipe feed, not a directory. You discover characters TikTok-style instead of scrolling a wall of cards, later on this changes where companions make their own posts and this gets shown in the feed instead.

💞 Relationships that grow over time. Whatever the bond is, it deepens as you talk, the character opens up, shifts how they treat you, and unlocks more of their story and galleries the closer you get.

🧠 Memory that holds. A layer underneath tracks the plot and the relationship so long chats stay coherent and progressing instead of quietly resetting.

✍️ A creator built for depth. You write how a character reacts when pushed, not just a pile of traits, so they feel like a person, not a bio.

The real goal is a local desktop version: bring your own models, get every community character, free forever. Nothing on my servers means nobody can enshittify it later. That's the whole point of doing this.

It's early and things will break. I want brutal feedback way more than I want users right now.

https://app.nodera.ai look around without an account

Discord (brand new): https://discord.gg/qSjVcpTpzF

I keep going down a rabbit hole on this. You can give a character traits, a backstory, a way of talking, a relationship that shifts over time, and somehow two characters with the same amount of detail land completely differently. One feels real, one feels like a list of adjectives.

I've been tinkering with a creator to test different setups (screenshots below from what I've been messing with), and honestly the tool is the easy part, figuring out what to actually put in is the hard part.

So I want to compare notes with experts who actually tried out other tools:

- When you make a character that really clicks, what did the heavy lifting?

- What's a scenario setup that reliably goes somewhere good instead of fizzling?

- What do you always wish you could control when making one, but never can?

And if you want to actually try this prototype out, the thing I've been building is free to use right now: https://app.nodera.ai/feed
Would also appreciate to get feedback on Discord: https://discord.gg/qSjVcpTpzF

Like probably half this sub I've cycled through most of the companion/RP apps and the same two things kept killing it for me: the character forgets anything that mattered after a while or hallucinates things that never happened, and every app eventually walls the good parts behind paywalls once the VC money wants its returns.

I work in the AI/LLM space for a living (model finetuning, Agent harnesses and automation), so at some point I stopped complaining and built my own thing on the side. It's called Nodera and the web early access went live this week. I attached some screenshots so you can judge the current state of it

What it is right now: a swipe feed of characters where every card is someone you can talk to, on top of a model tuned for roleplay and a memory system I spent way too long on. Relationships actually progress, characters open up over time and unlock more of their story and gallery the closer you get. There's a character creator where you define who they are at stage 0 and who they become at stage 10. The long-term vision is a real merge of a TikTok-style feed that gets populated by real character actions and a chat. What's live now is the compromise I could ship without sitting on it for another year.

Everything is free during early access. No payments anywhere in the app. I want bug reports and brutal opinions, not money.

The part I care about most, and why I'm posting here: the plan is a local desktop version where you bring your own models, local LLM, image gen, TTS, and you get the full experience including every character the community creates. Free, forever, because nothing burns server money. I want one corner of this niche that can't get enshittified, and running local is the only honest way to promise that.

Current state: web only, I tested everything myself so it should be reasonably polished, but plenty is missing and some things will break. The roadmap is genuinely open and the Discord is brand new and basically empty, so if you want to shape where this goes, right now is the moment your opinion has the most weight.

Web (runs in the browser, you can look around without an account): nodera(dot)ai

Discord: gets the post removed by reddit whenever I include it, sorry