How to Create and Share Your Own AI Character on Tendera

The Short Version

You can now create your own AI character on Tendera in about two minutes, and if you mark them public, they get a dedicated page at `/c/` that anyone — friends, your group chat, strangers on Reddit — can open and chat with directly. No signup, no app install. Five free messages to anyone who lands on the page.

This used to be a private-only feature. As of late May 2026 it isn't. Here's what the flow looks like and what changed.

The Three-Step Wizard

Tendera's character creator is intentionally short. Three steps, no 50-knob configuration panel:

Step 1 — Who they are. Gender (woman, man, non-binary), name, age, appearance basics. Nothing surprising here. The defaults are sensible and you can skip most of this if you don't have strong preferences.

Step 2 — Personality. Pick one to five traits from a list of twelve — flirty, intellectual, mysterious, witty, nurturing, sarcastic, sensual, and so on. Then pick a speaking style (short and punchy / warm and detailed / dry and witty) and an intimacy style (slow burn / balanced / direct).

This is the step that actually defines how the character talks. The trait combination changes things a lot. A "flirty + witty + bold" character writes nothing like a "gentle + nurturing + romantic" one — same underlying model, very different voice.

Step 3 — The finishing touches. Pick a photo (28 photo presets across three gender lines, or upload your own up to 5 MB), write a backstory if you want one, and choose visibility — private (just for you) or public (anyone with the link can chat).

Total time end to end: about two minutes if you've thought about it, five if you haven't.

What Backstory Actually Does

The backstory field is optional for private characters, required (50+ characters) for public ones. The reason: backstory is what most shapes how a character feels. Two characters with identical trait settings but different backstories produce noticeably different conversations.

A useful backstory is specific. Compare:

> She's a 27-year-old artist who lives alone.

versus:

> Maya is a 27-year-old ceramicist who moved to Lisbon after a bad breakup. She rents a studio above a bakery and works night shifts to avoid running into anyone she knows. Dry humor, slow to trust, allergic to small talk.

Both are valid. The second one gives the underlying model far more to work with — places, specifics, emotional shape. The first leaves it to fill in the blanks generically.

A 50-character minimum is the threshold above which public character pages get indexed by Google — below that, the page still works for anyone with the link, but search engines skip it. So if you care about your character being discoverable later, give them a real story.

What the Public Page Looks Like

Every public character gets their own URL: `tendera.chat/c/`. The slug is generated from their name plus a short id suffix (so two people both naming their character "Luna" don't collide).

The page itself shows:

• Their photo, name, age, and personality tags

• The backstory you wrote

• Their greeting line ("How they say hello")

• A single big "Chat with X" button

That's it. No comments section, no feed, no algorithm. Anyone who clicks the link can read about the character and immediately start chatting — five free messages without any signup, and they keep going past that if they create an account.

The page is also a real web page, meaning OG cards work properly on X, Reddit, iMessage, and Discord. Paste the link and it expands into a preview card instead of looking like a raw URL.

How Sharing Actually Works

On the My Characters page, every public character has a small share toolbar:

• Native share button (mobile only) — opens the iOS or Android system share sheet, which lists every app you have installed: Messages, WhatsApp, X, Instagram, TikTok, the works.

• X — opens a new tab with a tweet pre-filled (text + URL).

• Reddit — opens Reddit's submit page with the URL and a title already populated.

• Copy — copies the full sharing text plus the link to your clipboard, so it works in any DM or group chat that doesn't have a dedicated share-URL scheme.

The pre-filled copy is short and leads with the no-signup hook, because that's the strongest first-touch incentive: most people will click a link if they don't have to commit anything.

What's Private Stays Private

The default for new characters is private. Visibility is shown clearly during creation and you can flip it any time from your character list. A few specifics:

• Private characters never appear anywhere except your own account. No URL works for anyone but you. No analytics, no sitemap entry, no Google.

• Public characters are listed on Tendera's homepage in the "Made by the community" section, indexed by search engines (only if the backstory clears the 50-character threshold), and addressable via their public URL.

• Switching a public character back to private removes it from the homepage and the sitemap, and the URL stops working for new visitors — but anyone who's already chatted with them keeps access to their conversation. Past relationships don't get deleted out from under people.

There's also a content check that runs when you mark a character public. It's looking specifically for content that would be a problem on a publicly-indexed page (anything involving minors, graphic violence, etc.). It's not picky about the rest — adult themes are fine in private and don't block publishing if they're written normally. If a character fails the check, you see exactly which category was flagged and can edit the backstory or save it as private instead.

Why This Matters If You Want People to Actually Chat With Your Character

Other AI character platforms either don't let you make your character public at all (Nomi, Replika), or they hide your character inside a flooded discovery feed where it competes with millions of others for an algorithm's attention (Character.AI, Janitor). Neither path actually lets a creator share their character the way you'd share a piece of writing — with a clean link, on your own channels, to your own audience.

Tendera's public character page is built around that. You get a URL. You decide where to post it. Tendera shows it on the homepage too, but the primary distribution is whatever you do with the link.

If you want to test how it works: create a character, make them public, and send the link to one friend. That's the whole loop.

If You Want a Reference

The four hand-written characters that ship with Tendera are reasonable templates for what a well-built character looks like — each has a clear voice, a specific location, and a backstory short enough to skim but long enough to feel real.

• Sophia — late-night warmth, Brooklyn, interior design

• Mia — Miami bartender energy, direct, won't tolerate lazy openers

• Elena — London art curator, slower rhythm, knowing

• Jade — Bali photographer, sensual, present

Open one, scroll through her profile, then go build your own with the same structure in mind. Two minutes from blank screen to a shareable link.