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.

FAQ

Table of Contents

Mission / Goals

Conjured Ink is a community of creatives, developers, and supporters building software, support structures, and curated and reviewed documentation to make it easy for people who make things to be able to share it or sell it independently, without relying on large platforms for their livelihoods.

Origin Story

This project kicked off in the summer of 2025. Following a pressure campaign from the Australian activist group Collective Shout, payment processors strong-armed Steam and itch.io to remove content they found objectionable (an ill-defined moving target). This is not the first such pressure campaign. Many creatives—especially those whose media is NSFW or queer-focused—have faced a series of difficulties selling their work, moving from platform to platform as terms of service change. A few large payment processing companies exert an outsized influence on web commerce.

Platforms, like Steam and itch.io, are a single point of failure. They present a large target and if they (willingly or under pressure) alter their terms of service, it impacts all creatives. Conjured Ink, however, is not a platform. It does not present a large, inviting target for pressure campaigns, and is built to be resilient.

Read more on why we are doing this here.

How does this work? And what are some of these terms you keep throwing around?
What is a "market stall"?
Market stall is our term for individual storefronts. A market stall is a standalone ecommerce site (think woocommerce or Shopify!) that can be run very cheaply—or even completely for free, and easily even for those without techie chops.
What is a "bazaar"?
Bazaar is our term for a collection of market stalls. Stall owners can register their stall with any number of bazaars, and bazaar owners can include these products in search results. Think of it like an outdoor artisans’ market or the vendor space at a convention. Bazaar curation may be based on factors like genre/topic/theme (e.g. science fiction; monster romance), specific individuals (e.g. members of SFWA; a group of friends), demographics or media type. Creatives and their media can feature in multiple bazaars since the curated content within bazaars will inevitably overlap (e.g. a Romantic Fantasy book by a queer BIPOC author may appear in a catalogue for Romantic Fantasy media and a catalogue for queer BIPOC authors).
This sounds like a web ring. Is this a web ring?
It’s kind of like a web ring. Bazaars will connect independently-owned market stalls. The bazaar owners will be able to curate content based on criteria they choose, and market stalls will also be able to list the different bazaars their media appears in.
What does "FOSS" mean?
FOSS stands for free and open-source software. This means that anyone will be able to download and use the Conjured Ink software for free. (See our Codeberg repository.) It also means that anyone who wants to modify the software—personalize the design or functionality, or build additional modules—is welcome to do so.
What is "NSFW" media?
Not safe for work is a fuzzy, subjective category. We use it to indicate media that major payment processors may object to, often but not exclusively due to explicit sex. Many consumers want NSFW material; others seek to avoid it. Conjured Ink aims to foster a culture of consent: creatives make and market their work, consumers choose what kind of work they want to buy…and payment processors facilitate transactions, not censorship.
How can this help me?
How does Conjured Ink protect against censorship?
Individual creatives will manage their own market stalls, including agreements with payment processors (if warranted by the media they create, this may mean working with high risk payment processors specializing in adult/NSFW material). Bazaars will feature the market stalls of many creatives, but will not host content. If a payment processor objects to a particular creative’s work, it will have no effect on other sellers. Conjured Ink decentralizes risk. We can’t protect against all censorship—but we can help make the target smaller.
How does Conjured Ink make my work discoverable?
Creatives will operate their own market stalls—but those stalls can appear in multiple different bazaars. The more places your work is listed, the more potential buyers will see it. Bazaar curation will introduce a serendipity factor
How will you balance discoverability with safety?

Tagging and other descriptive metadata can and has been used to attack or censor creatives (especially with tags like “incest,” “rape,” and “taboo relationships”—tags which can indicate anything from explicit NSFW material to thematically heavy material to media with queer relationships to general content warnings).

There is going to be a special “cw tag” protocol between bazaars and stalls that allows stalls to freely tag sensitive works (nsfw, kinks, nc, etc, whatever), but those tags won’t be visible when looking at the work page itself, since they will be treated separately. When searching on bazaars, users can ask to omit any works that match those sensitive tags from their search results (through a user setting, not on the search box), but they can’t ask for those sensitive tags. This means that someone trying to find stuff to report/ban won’t be able to do it by searching for those tags in a bazaar, but that folks with triggers who want to protect themselves will be able to.

Ultimately, we cannot protect creatives from censorship campaigns. What we can do is reduce the size of the target. Anyone looking to remove all media tagged “rape” will have to target each individual stall owner, rather than a single platform. That’s a much more onerous task, potentially involving creatives from different nations and dozens of payment processors.

Will Conjured Ink support bundles?
Bundles are a great feature (one of the most popular on itch.io). We do plan to implement a bundle feature (though it might not be part of the initial offerings).
Specs (for the technically minded)
What are you using to build Conjured Ink?
Our own implementation is written in Rust, with the intention of having it be runnable on incredibly cheap/free hosting situations. We want it to be as accessible and fast as possible. That said, it is perfectly possible to have bazaar and stall implementations that integrate with the Conjured ecosystem, since in the end it’s based on standard web protocols, such as microformats2.
Do you have any performance benchmarks?
Conjured Ink is stupid fast. Like, you can run silverfish-stall on a potato and still do 30k requests/second with 10k concurrent connections.
Is this a cryptocurrency project?
The short answer is no; the core product under development does not enable cryptocurrency payments. The more nuanced answer is that developers may choose to write plug-ins to accept cryptocurrency payments, and the owners of market stalls and bazaars may choose to use those plug-ins. That’s how the FOSS ecosystem works.
Is this a Web3 project?
No. Conjured Ink is a love letter to the Indie Web. Note our complete lack of embarrassment with the web ring comparison. 😊
Will this support genAI?
Ideologically, the Conjured Ink collective is strongly against genAI, and the bazaar that we plan to run ourselves will not allow listings that involve genAI content in any capacity, as part of our listings
Specs (for the non-technically minded)
How much will this cost?
The Conjured Ink software will be free to download and use. Setting up a market stall may be free or low-cost (like any other website). The current stall software is able to run well within the bounds of the free tier for a hosting provider like Fly.io, and about US$5/mo for DigitalOcean. It’s also able to run with plenty of room to shine on a US$30 Raspberry Pi Zero that you keep in your closet.
I already have a storefront. Will I be able to use Payhip/Woocommerce/Shopify/etc. as a market stall and join bazaars?
Yes, but you would need a custom theme and a few other details pending us sussing out more details of our bazaar connection protocol.
How do I choose a payment processor?

We’re developing a toolkit to help our user base choose the payment processor that makes sense for them. Our volunteers are researching a variety of options, looking at pricing, terms of service, regional availability, and so forth. (You can see our progress to date on Codeberg.)

The short answer is, if you’re creating media unlikely to run afoul of the restrictions imposed by major players (Stripe, Paypal, MasterCard, and Visa), you’re probably best off using standard payment processing. If your media does fall into a category they consider high risk, then unfortunately your options become more narrow, specialized, and more expensive.

What if no payment processor will work with me?
While we’ll attempt to help you find a payment processor, our approach relies upon at least one of them agreeing to have you on board. If your media isn’t accepted by anyone—or if prospective payment processors are not available in your region—then that’s a bigger problem that we are not equipped to solve.
How does Conjured Ink deal with local restrictions (like the OSA, the UK’s age-verification law)?
Unfortunately, when it comes to both Bazaars and Stalls, they will still have to do age verification for visitors when they’re detected to be coming from one of these places that require it. We will be doing our best to make it easy to connect to cheap and accessible verification services, as well as make it easy to block visitors from these places altogether if that’s not available. Whatever it is, we’ll make sure to help you stay within the requirements of the law.
You keep mentioning NSFW media. What if I create the fluffiest, safest-for-work media possible?
That’s cool! Conjured Ink is work-agnostic. You can create a market stall—and share it with your boss!—and join bazaars, just the same as the creatives whose media is explicit, hardcore, and thematically challenging. You may not end up in the same bazaars, but who knows: the romance shelf can have sweet, chaste stories sitting next to steaming hot erotica. It’s all up to the owners of market stalls and bazaars. (And if, in the future, your fluffy work is targeted by activists or governments, you’ll already be using a resilient software system.)
Timeline
Will you have beta testing?

We hope to have an initial version of market stalls ready before the end of 2025, and start work in earnest on bazaars soon after that.

Being an open source project that anyone can run, we might put out a call for volunteers to try things out, but we won’t be doing any exclusive betas for stalls. We might have limited availability on our beta bazaar while we make sure everything is correct and stable.

When will you have a product ready to ship?
Likely mid-2026.
Governance
Who's in charge here?
Conjured Ink is a volunteer-managed collective with democratically elected leaders that serve short terms.
No, seriously. Who’s herding the cats?

There are a set of “Circles” which are given full autonomy and control over their respective areas (for example, the developers, the marketing team, the documentation team, etc), all of which have “equal” power within the larger organization. Each “Circle” operates democratically, internally, and also elects representatives to speak for them in a central “Shadow Circle”.

The Shadow Circle, then, is responsible for anything that doesn’t fall into any of the other Circles, and for resolving things that affect the collective as a whole (such as finances, conflicts between circles, overall governance issues).

To prevent single individuals from becoming “de facto” heads of the organization, representatives do not have unique individual power, and they are elected twice a year, with small term limits.

As of right now, a handful of people are setting Conjured Ink’s initial direction as inaugural members of the Shadow Circle. (This is our bootstrapping phase.) Decisions are made based upon general consent. Details about our governance structure and our various Circles are on Codeberg.

That sounds fine for now, but what about down the line?
At the end of 2025, we will hold elections for members of the Shadow Circle. Each Circle will elect their representatives, and going forward elections will be held every six months. This structure will facilitate coordination between Circles and allow the collective to hold their representatives accountable.
What about money and other legal stuff?

For the time being, money is being handled through fiscal sponsorship using OpenCollective. This allows us to receive and pay out money for organizational expenses. Responsibility for this falls on the Shadow Circle, and requires consent from all members to make decisions on who gets paid out.

We have set goals for how much it would cost us to create a legal entity, and may run fundraisers in the future to achieve this, but we’re trying to limit both our financial and legal liability for as long as we can manage, to make sure the project stays sustainable.

How can I help?
I'm a developer. Can I help?

Yes! The product is in active development. Initial development was in Elixir-based Ichor, but we have moved to Rust-based Silverfish. As of this month (September 2025), we are building out core ecommerce functionality (“market stalls”), after which we will begin themes and bazaar functionality.

I’m not really a coder. Can I help?

Yes! We have folks working on things like graphic design, publicity, copywriting, documentation, social media, community management.

I may want to use Conjured Ink after it ships. Is there anything I can do to help?

You are what’s known as a stakeholder: someone who has a vested interest in the direction and success of the project (even if you never write a line of code or share a social media post). Creatives who may ultimately use the product are encouraged to join the collective. Ideas, feedback, beta testing, and feature requests from people using a product are absolutely necessary to guide ongoing development and maintain accountability to the user base. In addition to informal-but-vital community participation, our governance structure includes formal roles for creatives (via our Creative Circle and its representation in the Shadow Circle).

Do you accept donations?

Not at the moment, but eventually. As a volunteer FOSS project, Conjured Ink hasn’t incurred much in the way of expenses during the development phase. But as we mature we will need to upgrade our technical infrastructure and internal tools.

Where can I learn more?
Can I get updates when something interesting happens?

Yes! Sign up for email notifications on the main page.

Are you on social media?

Yes! You can follow us on:

Do you have a discussion forum?

Yes! Join us on Discord for conversation, questions—or if you’d like to help out.

Can I see your code?
Yes! The Conjured Ink repository is on Codeberg. This is a FOSS project, so folks will always be free to use and modify the code to suit their own needs, as long as they follow the code’s license, which requires that any modifications be shared back with us (this means that no one can simply take our code and create proprietary alternatives with special features with it).