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Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a collection of questions that either I've been asked frequently or I believe people would be asking for.
While I've had very decent success with Flashcord's donations, I am very skeptical that in the FOSS world you can make a profit, especially with a Discord Bot such as Kosaka. Marketing and spreading the word about this Discord Bot is a SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult task than I have expected and I doubt I can rely this time on people willingly deciding themselves to throw their money at me (Flashcord had HUNDREDS of users, Kosaka has yet to reach in the double digits... Safe to say just leaving a donation button out in the wild isn't going to work).
Furthermore because of how Kosaka is structured, it is ungodly easy to rip code and dump them into another bot, something that I fear (and have feared with as well Flashcord equally in the past, hence its very restrictive license), I strongly believe the Discord Bot market is an incredibly daunting challenge to get yourself into, a lot of bots have already well established themselves and if I dare open-source Kosaka with features never before seen, I run the risk of other bots just yoinking my code while adding credit that's barely noticeable anywhere on their bot. Yes, I am aware there are licenses to prevent this very problem, but for the lack of a better word I am too scared shit-less of it happening anyway and as I am not able to engage in any legal battle due to my very unfavorable financial condition I'd rather take the nuclear option and just not risk to begin with putting my code up online. It also doesn't help that I've naturally always have been overprotective of my work especially during it's early stages.
It all depends on popularity and how much I feel like I should be rewarded for my work.
IF Kosaka becomes extremely popular to the likes of Flashcord then YES, Kosaka will be open-sourced as then I will have a greater chance of having generous people hand over donations, supporting my work and helping me out.
Otherwise I did set up a donation goal on Ko-Fi that will change over time depending on how much I worked on Kosaka, the goal's target is intentionally hidden because I do not want to pressure people into donating in the name of the Kosaka project due to how expensive and most importantly time consuming it is to work on. If that genuinely bothers people however then I will make it public.
As for the premium features... Maybe.
It's no secret that it doesn't cost me anything to host Kosaka 24/7 but like I established earlier, well I have to live right? These students debts ain't gonna pay themselves! Let's be real, spending time programming Kosaka is fun and all but I could just get a regular, infinitely higher paying job for a single month instead.
I have thus thought about giving Kosaka a premium tier, something where you just have to spend 1€ on Ko-Fi ONCE and then you are forever a premium user. I haven't implemented it yet and I'm really unsure if this is a good idea due to well, obviously it being a red flag since Kosaka is still very much a "freshly taken out of the oven" bot. Hence the maybe.
I'm aiming for a biweekly update schedule, although certain updates (notably v2.4.0) may take significantly longer due to the amount of testing I have to do. The Sirio Network discord server is incredibly dead and truly makes bug testing on a larger scale a true pain in the butt, and I really don't want to push broken code to everyone else.
Quite a complex story actually. In the long distant past of 2022-AD I wanted to dip my toes out of Flashcord for a little bit and got interested in making a Discord Bot as a learning experience as at the time I wanted to improve my Python skills since I was working on TSN_Trinity (and eventually "Seminar" aka the Flashcord Telemetry System). Thus "The Sirio Network Discord Bot" alias TSNDB was born. It was bad. Truly an experiment more than anything. It has a very primitive embed fixer (that just replaced links), the usual coin/rolling command and for the hell of it, an AI command.
Later down the line since the codebase was just a fat ass monolithic python script I decide to rewrite it, now under the name of "Kosaka" (which is based off Wakamo Kosaka from Blue Archive, you'll see why this is important later), it had the first, VERY primitive version of TSN_Abstracter and, for the most part, it actually worked pretty damn well (despite it being where the infamous hell of "Unknown Context" started). That version of Kosaka however was honestly a regression, it did have a few new commands and more silly ones, but it didn't have the link replacer which was annoying because that meant I still had the old TSNDB just laying around in the TSN server doing only that.
Anyways by that point it was 2023. Guess what also happened at that time! That's right! I went full schizo mode! Remember that AI thing? Well the AI was self-hosted (albeit extremely slow, the same was done on TSNDB), so it would be a shame if someone edited the model a tad bit to have an uncensored model and spit out some "very Wak-authentic" messages.
yeah i'm not too proud of that one. mika definitely isn't.
It definitely was hilarious at times though, because over time I modified the model more and more and because the shit wouldn't behave at times it would just spit out hilariously broken 1 word responses. Good times honestly.
But then, nothing. I just kinda stopped working on Kosaka completely.
Fast forward to 2025 and my YouTube Channel is starting to burn me out a LOT, so I decided to look back at some projects (TSN_Trinity again for example) and start rewriting them. I now had an actually working and nice version of TSN_Abstracter and decided it was time to put it to the test (... I was too lazy to finish Trinity and I've yet to still finish it at the time I'm writing this). So... Here goes a 2nd rewrite.
And I went to town with this one, first implementing the Archival system again with some very notable improvements in how I display stuff, then the Embed Fixer came to life and it really impressed some people, it was then that I realized, "okay, seems people actually like that thing, might as well make Kosaka public", the rest is history. I wonder what the future has in store for Kosaka.