in chimera, there are two primary ways to represent a system entity: a member profile (if you're familiar with simply, pluralkit, etc., you know what this is) or a proxy profile!
if you love "custom fronts" in simplyplural, or if you have an "anon"/"blurry" profile in your pluralkit, proxies could be very useful for you. <3
among my closed-beta friends, proxies have been used for members who want to be anonymous, members with "alter-egos" they want to keep separate from their main profile, and tracking "blurry"/"blended" states with more clarity on who is involved.
more detail + example screenshots below the cut!
overall, these are very similar to members; everything a member can do, a proxy can do. they can be added to front, send messages, maintain their own variants... etc, etc.
as a quick example: here is a member profile ("demo") and a proxy profile (..."proxy"), and some example messages from both.
as you can see! they look pretty damn similar!
what makes proxies special is the membership option. every proxy has a list of members (empty by default), and you can add any number of members (or other proxies) to it.
this addition can represent a lot of things: you might have a blurry proxy for your system and track who is blurred together by adding those members, or a team proxy for members who front together very often. you could have a "one of these three" proxy for members who are difficult to tell apart, or even an anonymous proxy.
here's an example of our demo member being added to the proxy profile.
every proxy has the option to show or hide their members list when they appear in front. here's an example of a proxy in front, and a proxy in front with their membership list revealed.
when their membership list is shown, members will appear listed in those square brackets. if the list is empty, or if the list is private, then it'll just be the proxy's name in front.
closing thoughts: proxies were inspired by custom statuses in simply plural, and our own need for more specific recordkeeping when it came to blurry fronts. <3 have fun
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will member variants extend beyond profile pictures? i think it could be really useful for fictivefluid alters and i think being able to pick what can be changed would be good for that kind of thing...
good question !! they do exist beyond profile pictures.
a variant has the following customization options: avatar, display name, pronouns, and tagline.
here are some examples of the base card and more customized variants :)
member banners, descriptions, colorsm and custom fields are constant for each entity, and can't be affected by variants. but, if you want more customization for a member, proxies are a good way to create alternate full profiles that can still be tied to one member (just add that member to the proxy!).
with chimera, you can log members in main, secondary, or tertiary front! each shelf can support any number of people listed. it's a nice way to record with more clarity.
you can also save members as always-fronting -- when someone is always fronting, if they're switched out, they move down to the always-fronting shelf instead of just being taken off the front display!
here are some examples:
fun fact for you. "proxy" is not a member! they are a proxy entity.
variants are probably my favorite and most-used feature of the bot :) they're mini-profiles for your members, basically! so you can quickly save and swap between different avatars, pronoun sets, and/or display names.
for example... this is Demo Member's base card - their default "profile preview". when they send a message, it'll look like this:
but this is their variant clouds!
and if you happen to activate that variant...
tada :) same member, same message tags used to make that webhook, new look!
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one of the earliest features we planned for chimera (back in 2024!) is the "who am i?" quiz.
this is inspired by those uquiz/quotev/etc answer percentages you can get after you take a quiz. the planned usage goes like this:
- create a series of questions with brief multiple choice answers
- each answer corresponds to one or more members in your system
- when opening the "fronting page" of whatever system, you can tap the "who am i?" button to start the quiz
- after selecting answers for all the questions, receive a list of who might be fronting, sorted by percentage of relevant answers
we've tooled around with this one on/off for ages. we thought about the answers being done uquiz style, where you "attach" members to each answer as you make it... but lately, we've been thinking about ways to track information beyond fields and groups, and it might slot in well here.
the idea is you can create "attributes" and assign those attributes to members like you're assigning groups. then, you can "automate" creating the quiz to some degree by having each question be, like, "which attribute applies?" and then you get the results that way. so then you can do updates quicker, and not have to manually add/remove individual members for x answer to y question each time something changes...
this might become a setting within chi groups ("set as attribute" or something), it might be its own feature... it's still a puzzle. we're enjoying brainstorming it though. i thought maybe y'all would have fun seeing the process 🩷
Will Chimera’s variants allow for alternative descriptions, or is it just imagery? And if so, could two different variants be shown in two different servers? I’ve yet to see a bot that allows both a “public” and “private” version of the same proxy without making multiple proxies in the first place
🌕 alternate descriptions,,, maybe. tell me more*.
alternate variants, yes!! chimera currently supports "server variants", which override the active variant based on server ids.
the hierarchy is like this: server variant -> active variant -> base profile.
so chi checks for a server variant, then checks for an active variant, and only if both of those are missing does it use the base profile rendering.
for public and private versions of the same bot... you could use a proxy to create a small profile for some member that can be public-facing, or you can save more private information in custom fields (which don't show up with the profile unless you explicitly change that setting).
*what would you want that to look like, if it was implemented? how would you want to use that feature (use cases, ways to update each version, etc.)?
Haii, do you have.. like an idea of when this is gonna be available to the public?
Btw it seems so awesome so far!! Love it:3
🌕 hiii thank you!! chimera is my passion project, i'm glad other people think she's cool :)
i have no idea when she'll be open to the public :( i'm hoping to open stage 2 of closed beta by august, but open beta or public release is at least three months away right now
my open beta release requirements:
- basic desktop&mobile website: allow users to edit & view system info
- stronger account presence; "friend permissions re: privacy", login/logout, etc.
- better encryption
- longer-term mass storage solution
it'll take a minute for me to complete this list to my own satisfaction. but we'll get there. i'm very excited for the day i get to release chimera with her variants and proxies and subsystem mechanics to the world :)
