Conjured Ink

Conjured Ink logo. It's an inkpot styled to look like a witch's cauldron sitting on a summoning circle. Next to it is a large feather quill. Above it all are the words 'Conjured Ink' in in a stylized hand-written font.

Building Connected Adult Marketplaces with Resilience

The Same Song And Dance

A new website bursts onto the scene. It's fresh, it's new, its free. It makes a big splash, making promises of freedom to post, host, and advertise whatever the user wants to put online. Inevitably, people flock to it, and the website expands rapidly. Either around the edges or, maybe, in the center of the spotlight, a vibrant subculture of horny, creative, expressively queer storytelling emerges, continuing from what came before while also being deeply unique to the given platform. And then, one day, that community gets strangled in its crib. The news comes down from on high, whether silently in an updated terms-of-service or loudly in a grand front-page public announcement. Sorry y'all, fun time's over, we have to ban NSFW now. There's a few days or weeks or months of panic, the queers rushing to find some new place they can run to or else bemoaning their inevitable fate. Then, one day, silence. The bot-scans come down and it all blows away like dust in the wind.

If you've been on the internet for any substantial length of time, this is a story you've probably heard already. The most recent example is itch.io, but it's been happening for years at sites like Gumroad, Tumblr, and Patreon. After so many repetitions of this same cycle, it's obvious there's some kind of pattern. But what? Two words: platforms and monopolies. The simple fact of the matter is that, in the current era of the internet, most content is hosted on huge websites where everything can go through a single point of contact; and more importantly, the same is even more true for anything involving money. Credit card companies, app storefronts, and multinational banks hold enormous power to act unilaterally, with very little in the way of anything to hold them back from allowing or disallowing whatever they want.

What this leads to is situations like what happened with the itch.io ban: a small group of Australian gender-critical anti-porn activists convinced credit card companies to drop the hammer on itch, and like clockwork, massive censorship of erotic content ensued. It all seems pretty hopeless, like creatives have no choice but to forever be at the whims of these giant corporations, always pushing them around from place to place.

A Different Direction

And that's where we come in. We are Conjured Ink, a collective of freaks, techies, queers, and radicals who banded together in the fallout of the itch.io ban in an attempt to build a new kind of website that would be more resilient against this kind of monopolistic action. Here's the basics of how it works: there's two parts to what we're building, the first being Conjured.Ink itself. It's not a platform like itch or Steam, but rather a catalogue, allowing for all the searchability that makes platforms like itch or Steam great for letting people find the work that creators put out, but without the centralized control that makes them so vulnerable to censorship by fintech companies.

The second half is our shop software. The shop software allows for any creator, even someone with minimal computer experience, to set up a personal storefront, and guides them through the process of connecting to hosting and payment processing services. Crucially, however, we do not own these pages at any point: the creative does, and our hope is that our shop software will also allow creatives to manage their own storefronts without needing a lot of previous experience in sysadmin.

This is crucial, because it means that there's no way for a payment processor to unilaterally destroy our entire catalogue at one fell swoop. Each storefront is an individually owned and hosted page, requiring separate and individual action from a payment processor wishing to shut them down. And the thing that must be remembered about companies is that they're lazy. Often times, merely increasing the amount of work required to take an action is enough to make these mega corporations back down! And even if they don't, the lack of a centralized point of weakness means that the taking-down of one or a handful of individual storefronts causes no harm to the catalogue as a whole. Even if an individual creative has their work censored, they can go right back and create a new storefront with a different payment processor or host, which will once more be visible on the main catalogue, which continues to function as normal.

Stay Updated

Sounds great, right? That's why we're building it. If you want to find out how to plug in and help build as part of our collective, check out our discord. If you want to sign up for updates as we build and eventually ship this alternative, check our landing page and enter your email. If you want to do both, go right ahead! If this isn't quite your speed, no pressure. We're here to empower creatives, not dictate the terms of their expression- unlike some others.