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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 24, 2026, 1:54 PM

    I don't know how to get the eyes or ears of any big #Fediverse movers or shakers, but if someone out there who is good with code wants to jump on a golden opportunity, one is presenting itself.

    A couple of days ago, Tapas warned all their creators that they were going to be shutting down. If you're not familiar with it, Tapas is a webcomics platform, and basically the only decent-sized alternative to Webtoon.

    If we could throw together some sort of ActivityPub-backed Webcomics platform, we could use it as a way to get a lot more people using Fediverse-adjacent technology.

    I don't have the time or energy to do any of this myself, and I am not good at coding, but I have been doing webcomics since the 1990s, and have watched the rise and fall of Keenspot, Drunk Duck, Wordpress and the RSS era, and now the modern "Walmart for Webcomics" era. This is a huge opportunity to present the Fediverse as a viable alternative.

    #webcomics #webtoon #tapas #artists #activitypub

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Replies

  • Liam Provenlproven@vivaldi.net
    Sep 24, 2026, 2:09 PM

    @thevhswizard

    "Alzo is your free home for fun on the web!"

    "Alzo is now part of the Blorp network."

    "Alzo is now Crung!"

    "Crung! is shutting down."

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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 24, 2026, 2:23 PM

    @lproven

    The worst part is that I literally cannot tell what is malice and what is incompetence anymore.

    The conspiratorial side of me says that this is some sort of deliberate plan by the big tech oligarchs to funnel everything into one of like four website buckets that they all own...

    But it could just as easily be that Kakao (the company that ran Tapas) was like "hey, it looks like webcomics made a lot of money, let's try doing that" and then found out the hard way that there's some heavy survivorship bias here, 99.998% of webcomics do not make money for anyone, they generally cost money.

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  • Liam Provenlproven@vivaldi.net
    Sep 24, 2026, 4:06 PM

    @thevhswizard BTW, full disclaimer, I have seen a version of this done before, but I looked and I couldn't find it and decided that the enshittification of mid-21st century search engines meant it'd take longer to find than retype.

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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 24, 2026, 4:09 PM

    @lproven

    Pro tip: If you use DDG, you can set the date range of searches - both the start AND end dates. I've found that if I search for something and put 2023 or 2024 as the end dates, I get a lot more useful results, as that stuff is all from before the internet started being mulched.

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  • Anne DelongAnne_Delong@musician.social
    Sep 25, 2026, 2:45 PM

    @thevhswizard @lproven

    Thanks for the tip! I use the "past day" and "past week" options in DuckDuckGo all the time, but never noticed the custom date range. If you have an idea when the item you are looking for was posted, you can really narrow it down.
    #searchengines

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  • Arcane Roopsarcaneoverflow@techhub.social
    Sep 24, 2026, 8:03 PM

    @thevhswizard @lproven I read a lot of Doctorow, so to my mind the "don't attribute to malice" rule doesn't apply when one of the big 5 monopolies buy anything that is fun, or brill, or both.

    Fuck it. Profit is pants.

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  • Ember is so tired. :catplant:​Ember@blobfox.coffee
    Sep 25, 2026, 1:38 PM

    @MegaMichelle many comics already do use wordpress, but the point of sites like webtoons is accessibility (not needing to set up wordpress) and discoverability (both webtoons and tapas frequently put niche comics on the front page)

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  • Michelle HughesMegaMichelle@a2mi.social
    Sep 25, 2026, 1:42 PM

    @Ember

    Couldn't you use WordPress, not to publish your own comic, but to set up a place for authors to publish their comics?

    If not, you could probably do it with Drupal and their activity pub plugin.

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  • Oblomovoblomov@sociale.network
    Sep 26, 2026, 4:05 PM

    @Ember @thevhswizard my understanding is that the biggest issue is monetization, which is something that Webtoons and Tapas offer(ed), at least within some given constraints. How would anything similar be achieved on the Fediverse?

    (Hosting-wise, ComicFury still exists, and in fact remains my favorite choice for reading webcomics that are not self-hosted.)

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