3 Years on Civitai!

(Ok I lied that's like 6 days from now but you all know I WILL NOT REMEMBER)

Introduction

Oh by god the "don't make me" feels come running in. Ok so this journey has been a lot more real than you all realize. This won't be as political or outright annoying as it usually is. Normally in here you'll have me complaining one side or another what's wrong and how to fix... But y'know that's life, we're dealing with corporation level stuff here and i'm just exhausted! It's really been an interesting WILD ride and I'm kinda here to spill a little of my future rather than whine about the past! (ok and explain some of the journey changes of our team of Ktiseos Nyx!)

The First Year

"the first cut is the deepest"...

Yea not really, just that that first year was really the weirdest? Everything moved way extremely fast, and that's when I already had a lot of followers in the first six months. Mind you I already know that before it became, me, Terra and Angel -- that I was posting just as much if not more than i do now?

Geeze, just before I joined SD 2 and 2.1 dropped, and then by the time the middle of 2023 happened there was SDXL! I haven't touched SD 2 pretty much since 2023... and I'm pretty happy that I haven't used SD2 since then lol.

I spent so much time not understanding how anything works - mind you some would claim that in 3 years i still don't know squat. I went from tinkering in midjourney to spending all this money on colab or huggingface to learn to train things.

We got some really interesting bounties from TensorArt that year, we even got sponsored for a while from Pirate Diffusion!

Dang that was an interesting year! -- Of course sure I tried to leave more than once that year, but that comes with the territory. That was also the year I tried to be come a moderator aaaand I panicked and cancelled my application because my mental health saw XXX and ran the other way.

The Second Year

"the second cut is not the deepest?"

OK Fine I ran out of weird lyrics to point things to. We were still diving into SDXL and SD 1.5 mostly in the beginning of the second. Still kinda going strong, we had the creator program that year - that was QUITE neat. (Not going into the DOWNFALL of it because i'm not here to whine lol.)

Started developing Dataset Tools, was already long into making helpful tiny jupyter notebooks and colab notebooks for silly things. "VIBE" coding became an escape from the things that were a little harder - but at the time I had 0 clue how things worked. Barely understood how python worked, (I like to joke I still don't.) and was just tryin to chug along.

While there were YES bumps in the road - a lot of them large, and hard to handle -- there were some really neat creative things going on for 2024. We had a lot of creative collection ideas that Maxfield gave us to meet that year. (Hint to the staff: Civbot's contests are neat, but if you're ever interested you could get me to make things for absolute free that are wildly different - I like challenges lol.) We were doing creator challenges, meeting "design" briefs and doing things in a way that felt like i'd been meeting what my degree taught me.

PonyXL was going fairly strong, and much appreciation to Astralite, because it was a learning curve that taught me a lot more about lora training at the time. You can't just YOLO it with differing fine tunes lol.

Burnout a lot of the time is what then causes me to want to leave again lol. There's never a year I haven't tried to run away from "HOME" just because someone in the " family " rubbed me the wrong way lol. Burnout hilariously enough is likely my own doing, and not my partners who are involved now.

We didn't change to KNX yet, Terra still had their own profile but still kinda was making me do all the work (AHEM STILL IS LOL). Hadn't gotten a chance to teach Angel yet how to do things in this year, but he was curious.

The Third Year

"First second, third -- raspberry" Yea I'm not going to get myself banned for that one. (It wasn't NSFW, but y'know moderation has to moderate lol.)

We learned about IllustriousXL, and NoobAI XL. WE LEARNED of Flux! We learned of CHROMA! Hell we learned about so many new things. Sure Video AI kinda existed before our third year, but it wasn't until the third year that we were seeing Vidu, and Veo and Qwen. We learned about Claude code in our terminal...

We learned more about lora training.

We also saw more changes this time around:

The creator program became the NEW creator program. While I STILL don't 100% like the system itself, because the bidding system is VERY difficult to deal with when you're not making enough buzz to sustain even using it -- it is neat that more people are able to monetize. (See I CAN BE NICE ABOUT IT!)

I tried leaving.
I made my stance before that.
I blew my model count up.

Mind you that was AFTER we changed my username from duskfallcrew to Ktiseos Nyx -- because around this time we also were now Angel, Terra and myself. It was easier. Angel's computer doesn't have a lot of space, and while he DOES do the merges and training with me on occasion - I do the uploading. Teaching Terra however to do the tech things is like pulling teeth. "Upload this " "Where."

I would call the third year: A learning year.

Dataset tools hit over 50 stars in the better part of 2025, and by the time 2026 just hit? 60+ stars.

Middle of that year we got fed up with trying to do things in Civitai's lora trainer, not because it's bad - but because it's different and not meant to be used for all things advanced... We get kinda tetchy after a while and when we learn more things we gotta try new things.

So we started making our Jupyter based lora trainer that we threatened to do the year before. We forked Derrian Distro's backend from AndroidXXL and Jelosus2, grabbed old data from Linaqruf's colabs, and studied the dataset maker from Holostrawberry.

We figured out about three months into using it that it was already experiencing growing pains. We were given a couple weeks free use of the new claude code on the web, and we learned quite fast what NextJS/NodeJS was capable of.

We'd already built a plural chat app that was not meant ot mirror discord at all, it wasn't even a cross, or even useable internet hookup - it was just for those with DID or even role players to keep track of things. But the tkinter version was slow, it was hard to handle and while it looks really nice in theory - it's just not the level of polish we learned to do in our design degree..

That's not off topic by the way.

Because that was the item that got us into NextJS. We started realizing we could move the lora trainer into NextJS, we started realizing Dataset Tools is better in Node & Next. It was sitting under our nose the whole time: Civitai runs on react. IT's not REACT ITSELF that is the reason Civitai sadly takes 3gb in chrome. The secret to that sadly is: Civitai has to as a company have trackers, and advertising - that tends to be along with payment processor tracking details and otherwise WHY things take so much. Animated pixels, large image sizes, videos etc - they're the ones that can as any Website - bloat your ram.

Which isn't Civitai's fault, it's the nature of the platform.

Electron is the same way: While yes discord and spotify BOTH run on electron: They're actually not that bloated in some ways. The bloat is the chromium build under the hood. Nobody wants to make their own browser, and by the time they do the thing gets shut down and everyone defaults to Chrome.

What about FOUR?

Watch me lie to you in the next paragraph...

There won't be a "FOURTH YEAR" section to this because 2026 ONLY JUST started, and we haven't quite hit the "THIRD YEAR" mark for another four days LOL. We've seen the change of the guard here at Civitai, we've seen people come and go - we've seen spaces and models and everything change.

We're still dedicated to wasting our money on things that bring us joy even if they don't bring us money. Largely because we're still building, we're learning new things - and trying to get paid doing it.

We understand AND VALUE: that the economy of AI has been changing and the way that the creator situation had to change while sad, frustrating and very difficult at the time... The new process maybe isn't perfect for those of us that were in the original version..

It's a change, and it wasn't our choice to change it one way or another. It provided a chance for others to grow and learn and earn. Our only issue sadly was just that the cost to re-subscribe to be able to pay in to earn more - became too much. It wasn't that the 3 monthly cost was too much on Civitai's side. It was that by the time the middle of 2025 came in: NZ's economy started tanking, and our dollar dropped to a level of that i'd only seen since I first moved here.

When it costs nearly twice as much as it did the month before: You have to skimp sadly, and there have been chances to earn just nearly as much as I was before... But the current cost to invest to bring that money back is a little more than I'm willing to put in for the risk. Maybe this year i'll attempt it, I still have money I banked that I can't take out because I made a stupid mistake a few months back!

(As in: I literally banked like 110k buzz way too early into the process, and it ended up as 47 USD and you CAN ONLY TAKE OUT 50 or more lol. This wasn't on Civitai's fault, it was an RNG moment of stupidity on my own part.)

As 2026 starts to roll in harder and I realize my bones aren't as young as they used to be?

I'm realizing that more and more I'm not just a designer of models, i'm building a community of my own and I need to start working harder on that. It's been really wild.

I mean I did cheat on AI for like a whole month in 2024 when Dawntrail dropped, and that's largely why a lot of times i'm taking more than a couple days break in code: I'm still playing FFXIV, i'm still reading comics, i'm still watching shows.

I'm still dabbling in AI music scarily as much as I wasn't sure I was going to like it. I still can't stand Suno or Udio - but i've used those so I know why AI music sort of erks me. AI video's kinda neat but it's also kinda scary.

But yea: 2026 is more of a foundational building year, I did my growing up and learning. It's time to learn MORE and build more.

That's about all I'm gonna offer!

If you're curious about what we're building:

Socials & Contact

Easy as pie: https://beacons.ai/duskfallcrew

But if you wanna hang out in KNX and get updates on coding projects and otherwise and even advertise your own content:

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