Vision

Open Source

Yumina started as a personal project - a fork of SillyTavern, integrated with the Godot game engine, that let AI control not just text, but also visuals, variables, and even sound. But SillyTavern’s original architecture was built in the era of pure text simulation. Despite the countless open-source contributors who built plugins over the years, its foundational structure was always going to limit how far it could evolve toward AI-native games and interactive cinema.

Today, Yumina has its own independent AI-native game engine, multiplayer support, and multi-agent worlds. Just as SillyTavern’s greatest extensions came from its open-source community, we believe Yumina belongs to the community too, and only the community can make it better. Yumina is fully open source, from the game engine to the frontend. You don't need to log in to use your own API locally for creating, playing, and building new features.

This is why Yumina will never be a platform that profits from your AI usage. We want to lower the barrier to AI entertainment as much as possible so everyone can experience it. In fact, Yumina’s name comes from the Japanese words yume (dream) and minato (harbor) - a dream harbor. We also believe that trying to profit from AI usage pushes platforms toward greed over time: offering worse models, shortening context windows, and selling user data. That limits creators’ freedom and makes gameplay worse for everyone.

Why Centralize & Commercialize

So why didn't we stop at a completely free and open-source app?

The AI roleplay space is polarizing right now. On one end are commercial apps that operate almost entirely closed-source, with heavy content restrictions, and sometimes outright stealing work from the open-source creator community. On the other end are communities that, for historical reasons, have a deep ideological opposition to anything commercial or centralized. But in both extremes, the ones who suffer are always the creators who build for the love of it.

So, alongside open-sourcing the product, we also built a centralized website where we allow creators to monetize and protect their works. On this website, creators choose for themselves: allow downloads and editing, allow commercial use, or restrict both. If a creator wants to fully open their work at no cost, anyone can download it or experience it using their own API. If a creator wants to commercialize and restrict downloads, players who want to play must go through the platform's official Credits system. That keeps their content from being easily stolen. It’s entirely up to the creator, and we believe that choice is their right. Expecting every creator to give away their work would be like asking every author to upload their books online as free PDFs.

From the player's and platform's perspective, this also makes sense. Most players won't clone an entire GitHub repository — many just want to open a world and start chatting, anytime and anywhere, on your website. And a significant portion of those players are free users. These needs are things a purely open-source app simply cannot meet on its own.

Protecting Creators & Players

Born from the community, Yumina fully respects all intellectual property and copyright, and absolutely prohibits any form of plagiarism. Our first fully developed system was the reporting system. We actively search for plagiarized works and enforce bans and takedowns, but we also encourage the community to participate: on every world's detail page you can submit reports and upload evidence.

While simple plagiarism is easy to identify, the real world is rarely that simple. For example: the first creator of a fan work built around an anime's plot, illustrations, and music — do they have the right to prevent other creators from making similar fan works? How unique must a jailbreak or writing style description be before it counts as a creator's personal intellectual property? These lines are often blurry. That's why all reported content and outcomes are publicly posted in the Discord community, where players can request review or vote on plagiarism determinations.

Creator Revenue

Today, creators earn from tips. Players can tip a creator's world directly, and after a 20% platform fee the rest goes to the creator. You can cash out through Stripe, or spend your tips on mushies or a membership on the Plans page. See Earnings & Payouts.

Creators won't get a share of token usage. Yumina doesn't make money from AI usage, so a token share isn't something we could sustain.

We're planning a Creator Fund and discussing how it should work with creators on the community forum: what it should reward (AI interactions, time spent, unique players, quality or community votes) and whether creators should be able to sell their works, like a game or a book. Earning from works built on copyrighted material may not be legal, so some fan works may not qualify. We're still getting legal advice on this. Once the details are decided, we'll announce them here and in the community.

Privacy & Security

If you use our local version, all your data stays entirely on your own computer.

On the web version, we store chat history only to keep the product functioning. Users can delete and export their data at any time. Private chat is never used for advertising, data sales or sharing, or model training. We protect user privacy in accordance with GDPR data protection principles, and all data is currently stored on AWS in the US.

We believe the law is the floor, not the ceiling — we hold ourselves to higher ethical standards. We will take every measure to ensure that users' data is never compromised.