@zkat I made something similar when the itchio thing happened https://github.com/liana-p/indie-game-storec which is a template for self hosting for free that can be deployed straight to Vercel and only requires changing environment variables. I think it's especially important to keep it free or low upfront/upkeep because there's a lot of niche small devs who might not make much money from their games and can't afford the running monthly costs that a lot of platforms cause, hence the free tiers

Discoverability is still gonna be the issue long term and being able to connect different stores sounds good, though at the same time I think it might be better long term if discoverability was software agnostic.
That is to say, whatever open platforms we create for people to find and browse game shouldn't need to care about how the websites selling the games are made, they should just link to the stores. Then people can sell their games on any platform or self hosted solution and still list them on the platforms where people find games

@zkat this is so beautiful!

@zkat

Did you find a way to protect yourself from censorship pressure by payment processors?

I get from the blog post that conjured.ink is designed to avoid that pressure on the storefornt, but I can't seem to find how the individuals would be protected from payment processors simply refusing to process their individual business transactions?

@zkat This is very cool even I don't really understand what its supposed to be other it might be a webring of sorts.

But still good luck on it, its looks awesome!

@zkat Interesting project, but the “we just link to” approach won’t sustain at least in German legislation, where they can make you responsible for websites you link to. (The original verdict was limited, but there are absurd cases.)

The usual disclaimer is “when I made the link I could see nothing illegal”. I don’t know if that’s enough. IANAL

Liability of “platforms” for their users’ doings is another beast.

Better prepare for a legal fund.

@zkat Congrats on the launch!

Maybe a naive question, but I remember you had another art platform called Banchan that you were working on. Is that still a thing, and if so, how does it compare to Conjured Ink?

@zkat@toot.cat
Great initiative, thanks folks!

Not sure, if I could be of any help, I can "only" write HTML and some CSS, creating simple websites.

(Besides, I wanted to have a deeper look into indieweb myself.)

PS: I can't use Discord, as it's a proprietary system, using the content generated from users to train their AI.

@zkat heads up, the link doesn't work because of the trailing paren