Yorus went into maintenance mode on May 7. The front door is a single page that says we will be back. Behind it, the rest of the app is being torn out and put back together.
I want to explain why, because doing this in the open is the part that matters to me.
What was breaking
The honest answer is churn. People tried Yorus, hit a wall, and did not come back. When I looked at why, every road led to the same place: the product was too complex for what it was actually doing.
Before maintenance, Yorus ran on worlds. A world was a strict piece of gameplay with its own rules, its own state, and its own way of moving the story forward. That sounded great on paper. In practice it was a cage.
- No branching. Once a scene went a direction, that was the direction.
- No rewind. If a reply landed wrong, you lived with it.
- No editing your own messages.
- No swipes. One reply per turn, take it or leave it.
- No personas. The character you played was whoever the world said you were.
On top of that, worlds were fragile to build with. Every new character meant fighting the system, because every character had to fit a strict shape the world expected. It scared off creators and it shrunk the kinds of stories Yorus could host.
So we moved off worlds and onto bots. A bot can be a character, an assistant, or a whole open-world simulator running a cast of people and a place. The shape is flexible. The story is whatever happens between you and the bot, with branching, rewind, edits, swipes, and personas built in from the start.
Why I took it down instead of patching live
There is a normal way to do this. You ship patches every day on a live app, and you tolerate the part where things break for some people some of the time. I have done that before. I did not want to do it this time.
The product is small enough that visible churn becomes the story. Someone opens the app, a feature is half rewritten, they leave and tell a friend that Yorus is broken. Then I lose the one slot of attention that person was ever going to give me.
So I put up a maintenance page and worked through the floor plan in one pass.
What is coming back when we open
- Replies that stream in as they are written, instead of waiting for the full block.
- Memory that holds the thread of a long session.
- A real credit system. Every reply has a price you can see, and there are separate pools for replies and voice.
- A creator dashboard with audience counts, chat counts, and a trend line for every bot.
- Follow and save, so the people you like and the bots you want to come back to do not disappear into the feed.
- A faster app frame with a sidebar that remembers itself.
Why five days
Long enough to do the work. Short enough that I do not lose the people who tried Yorus once and were waiting to see if it got better.
Thanks for waiting. The next post is about the credit system, which is the thing I changed my mind about most during this rebuild.
Gold, founder