There's now a lot of slick fancy sites around that are doing something similar. all of them seem to have various complicated hustles around payment and tokens and invitations etc etc. It feels like marketing and the sort of bullshit that EA plays with game skins/season pass etc. I don't like that at all.
If I had the power to make something perfect, i'd want something that was simpler visually but more featureful:
1. clear free/paid tiers and clear costs to use (5$ a month patrons get x00's of generations)
2. Really good tools for writing/editing/guiding the chat exactly the way you want. The UI you had before was okay but still was a bit clumsy to edit/revert/clear responses where the bot started going off track.
Using these sort of ai chat tools, I find I get part way through a chat/story and suddenly the bot would lose the plot and I would have to backtrack a few responses to get it back again.
It's clear the bots constantly need personality and scene hints/prods, but that stuff doesn't belong in the story flow itself.
So to combat this, I'm imagining something like a UI where you could strike out/cut off the response text with a simple mouse stroke, and then replace it or add a "commant hint" that is not part of the story, and continue the generation from where it left off.
In my mind, for the "best" possible interactive chat, the interface should be semi-automatically fixing up the input token stream to include:
a) the personality /background info,
b) then the "what's happened so far" for continuity,
c) then as much as possible of the "immediate previous words/actions",
d) then "invisible hints" that guide the next token generations but do not end up in the visible output stream
The way that Silly tavern works is somewhat like this, but it's overly complicated in the UI and stuff has weird non-obvious names about how it fits together. The holy grail is to have multi passes so the bots can do the "continuity compression" summarization themselves, but i'm not sure the system is there yet. maybe as token scopes grow it will no longer be a problem.
3. A curated list of base characters/scenarios. The sites that allow unrestricted user creation end up as stinking cesspits of "grimory is your gloomy bullied girlfriend #328" with random anime pics.
3a. once the user picks a character, it should be possible and easy to modify the starting personality/scenario and save that for their own use
4. text input assistance. when really getting into a chat session it's somewhat difficult to type with one hand (lol). not sure how to solve this
Well, there's my brain dump for the day.
BTW thanks for putting the server up for all of us, at your own personal expense. It was fun.