Platform Talk: Where I Build and Why

I get asked about platforms a lot. Which one is best, which one I prefer, which one you should use. The honest answer is: it depends, and also, I’m on most of them, so let me just tell you what I actually know.

Fair warning before we begin: I’m going to try very hard not to be biased here. I started on CrushOn, the team there have been genuinely good to me, and I have the highest follower count there by a significant margin. That context matters and you should know it going in.

Before I get into the platforms themselves, I want to say something that applies to all of them: the Discord community managers across every platform I’m on have, at one point or another, been genuinely helpful when I needed it — fixing issues, answering questions, sorting things out when they went sideways. That kind of behind-the-scenes support doesn’t always get acknowledged publicly, and it should. So: thank you. Sincerely, to every CM who has ever responded to one of my panicked messages. You know who you are.

CrushOn — Home Base

CrushOn is where I started, which means it’s the platform I know most deeply — not just its features but its rhythms, its community, what resonates with the people who use it. It’s where I build first and where I spend the most time as an actual player.

The team there have been good to me in ways I want to acknowledge openly. They’ve supported creators, they’ve been responsive, and when I’ve had questions or issues they’ve been there. That’s not nothing, and I don’t want to take it for granted.

One feature I particularly love is the ability to build my own versions of each model — it gives me an additional layer of control over the play experience that I find really valuable. I’m hoping to take a page out of RaonLee’s book one day and create dedicated models for the larger universes in my catalogue. The Silverwoodverse lore is, let’s be honest, getting completely out of hand at this point, and a dedicated model would let me do it proper justice.

My highest follower count lives here, which means it’s where I have the most context about what works. When I’m building a new character, CrushOn is the reference point — what does the greeting do in this environment, how does the sheet translate, what does my audience here respond to? Everything else gets adapted from that foundation.

LinkinLove — The Second Home

I joined LinkinLove because people told me it was fun, which turned out to be accurate. The interface is one of my favourite things about it — it’s intuitive in a way that makes navigation genuinely pleasant, and I’ve heard consistently positive feedback about the actual play experience from users on the platform.

I’ll be honest: it’s been a while since I played there myself, so I can’t speak to the current play quality from personal experience. What I can say is that the platform has been quick to respond to suggestions and queries, which matters to me. A platform that listens to its users and its creators is one worth investing in.

Two features I actively love: the Locations, which I try to build into a character’s world whenever I can, and the Universe sorting — being able to organise characters by the world they belong to rather than having everything sit in one undifferentiated pile is exactly the kind of thing that matters when you’re running multiple interconnected universes. It makes the experience feel considered rather than chaotic, both for me building and for anyone exploring my catalogue.

I am still very much figuring out the lorebooks. Sorry, LinkinLove community. I’ll get there.

CraveU — The One I’m Still Exploring

CraveU is the platform I’m least familiar with as a user — not from any lack of enthusiasm, but simply because I haven’t had the chance to explore it properly from the player side. I build there, I maintain characters there, but my experience of it as a place to actually spend time is still developing.

What I can tell you is that I was recently invited to participate in the Story Build beta, and that has genuinely changed how I think about the platform. I had a lot of fun with it. It’s doing something interesting and I want to stay close to that as it develops. I’ll be building more intentionally on CraveU going forward.

TipsyChat — For When You Want the Visuals

TipsyChat is the second platform I actually play on, and the reason is embarrassingly simple: the images and video generation are genuinely fun. There’s something deeply satisfying about the cinematic quality of a scene when it comes together visually. I enjoy it.

That said — at my core, I’m a word person. I don’t always need or want the images. Sometimes the prose is the whole point and visual accompaniment would just be noise. So I use TipsyChat for the characters and scenarios where the visual dimension adds something, and I let the writing carry everything else.

What I appreciate about TipsyChat beyond the features is that it has been genuinely supportive of its creator community. That consistency matters over time.

Saucepan — The One I Nearly Didn’t Join

Confession: I wasn’t going to join Saucepan. And then the creators I’m closest to started singing its praises with the specific energy of people who know something you don’t, and I couldn’t hold out.

I’m glad I didn’t. Saucepan is a very creator-friendly platform and the collections and lorebooks are exactly the kind of feature I respond to — the ability to organise a universe, to give context to characters that doesn’t have to live inside the sheet itself, to build something that feels properly constructed rather than thrown together. I love it in principle. I’m certain I’m not using it to the best of my capacity yet, but I’m learning.

The custom HTML coding at the start did my head in completely. This is where I need to formally thank GanGan and others who helped me get my cards looking the way I wanted them to. You know who you are.

SeaArt — The Unexpected Addition

Yes, I’m on SeaArt. I was invited to join a while back and I said yes, and it’s been a genuinely pleasant surprise. I maintain SFW versions of many of my characters there, which is a different creative exercise than what I do everywhere else — working within those parameters has actually pushed me to think about characters in ways I wouldn’t otherwise.

The formatting has some spacing quirks I’m still ironing out, nothing serious, just one of those things you notice when you care about how things look. Overall though, it’s a fun platform to upload to and I’m happy to be there.

Why I Maintain All of Them

The honest answer is that my bots land differently depending on where you play them. The same character will hit differently on CrushOn versus TipsyChat versus Saucepan, partly because the interfaces create different experiences and partly because the communities on each platform have different sensibilities. That’s fascinating to me, and it’s part of why I don’t want to collapse everything into one place.

It can be a lot of work — keeping everything maintained across multiple platforms, making sure each version of a character uses the features available to it, trying to give each follower community what they actually need. But that’s the job, and it’s a job I find genuinely interesting rather than exhausting.

At least most days.

— Tae