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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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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 24, 2026, 3:24 PM

    @thevhswizard

    Obviously the odds of somebody spinning up a new Fedi platform in real time are low.

    But what exactly is a "webcomics platform", technically?

    We already have Pixelfed and some other federated image-sharing platforms, so could one simply use those? What would be lacking?

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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 24, 2026, 3:55 PM

    @thevhswizard
    I'm not trying to be snarky or anything, BTW.

    I post a lot of images, and decided to use Pixelfed for that, because it was the best fit I could find at the time.

    There's also Wafrn which is supposed to be Tumblr-like. And of course, one can just post images on Mastodon -- I know @davidrevoy posts a 4-panel comic this way.

    So it seems like it's more about an instance that specializes in web comics, maybe..?

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  • The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙thevhswizard@retro.pizza
    Sep 24, 2026, 4:04 PM

    @TerryHancock @davidrevoy

    Yeah, I suppose it would depend on what people were looking for out of it, I think the only big things that Comics usually look for would be:

    - Indexing for an archive, so you can jump around "chapters" and the like, which would likely need some extra scripting outside of the ActivityPub standard.

    - Probably some sort of static landing page, like a profile page for each comic, one that shows their most recent post as a defualt and lets them do a little more customization/personalization

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  • will have been preventablevirtulis@loud.computer
    Sep 26, 2026, 3:00 AM

    @TerryHancock @thevhswizard I don't know what the authors need or have come to expect. But I can answer as a reader:

    – most formats won't fit in a federated post, so it must work as a standalone website without any auth etc.
    – simple and reliable navigation between episodes of a single title (which an author can have multiple of, and which is likely ongoing)
    – a mobile-friendly UI that can accommodate different page formats and isn't ridiculously slow.
    – some sort of a recommendation system, yes, fedi hates an algo, but even manual shout-outs of eachother can go a long way.

    Of more technical concerns:

    – if it's going to be randomly boosted onto people's timelines, those boosts will probably work better if the booster can pick something specific as a preview, i.e. we're potentially looking at every panel being a separate "post" somehow.
    – it'll be a killer feature if it's able to somehow have "members-only" content with a time unlock for everyone else. then add Patreon integration and everyone's existing patrons can suddenly read with something a bit more usable than a PDF reader (or worse, Patreon UI). I'm not sure if AP allows for posts to change visibility, but being a paying member might be incentive enough to just visit the website.

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  • Dead Metalpoet's societymetalpoetnl@metalhead.club
    Sep 27, 2026, 4:45 AM

    @virtulis @TerryHancock @thevhswizard I was a webcomic author once, long ago, and one big feature is scheduled publication.

    Like most people doing it I would often create several comics in one big sitting, a good platform would let me upload them all but set a date when each should go live, to maintain a consistent schedule.

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  • Tykayntykayn@mastodon.cipherbliss.com
    Oct 15, 2026, 10:14 AM

    @metalpoetnl @virtulis @TerryHancock @thevhswizard yup, there are UX and practical concerns about such a platform.

    As someone who produces comics and studied it, and enjoyed so much when people massively had comic blogs, and used several platforms to publish my pages (manolosanctis, a french one who died a few years ago) I really would love to see something like that get real.

    So because i also am a freelance dev who puts some libre stuff for free on my computer, i started to build something federated around the Symfony Framework, and added some stuff to help people import what they do from other platforms, add moderation tools, admin stuff, financial support links, comments, added some of my drawings, a possibility to translate pages and series of pages, and it is already working with examples demo account and my drawings in the tykayn account. but yeah, before being ready i will need to test a lot of things, exporting account works, RSS feeds too, but emails sending do not work yet.

    calico-webcomic.cipherbliss.com

    sources are AGPLv3+ , but remember, this is very beta.
    about how much does it cost to run: it depends on the storage, i have set up some quotas, but having 20Gb of pages would cost me nothing more than running this mastodon instance. portability matters too.

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  • Þommythomasjwebb@mastodon.social
    Sep 24, 2026, 5:32 PM

    @thevhswizard is there some good software that already exists that could be the basis for this, perhaps with a new frontend? Weirdly, wp or Ghost might be a good practical solution because it's time-tested and on fedi.

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  • ɹ uɐp :antifascism:dannotdaniel@hellions.cloud
    Sep 25, 2026, 2:18 AM

    @thevhswizard came well I'm always looking to boost fedi adjacent ideas, plus your profile is hilarious so at least this gets a boost and a follow

    having said that, here's my dumb question: what more would they want than just vanilla mastodon?

    I don't know much about the webcomic space or how the fedi might work for their goals (especially if money is involved)

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  • Gracious :loading: Anthraciteanthracite@dragon.style
    Sep 25, 2026, 2:37 AM

    @dannotdaniel @thevhswizard

    so one day you might post a single page of a comic you've been working on for several years

    but this page has context: it may be part of an *episode* a *chapter* or an *issue* (and it might be part of more than one of those at once), and all of those episodes/chapters/issues can make up large units like a *book* or an *arc*

    and *those* larger units can be collections too, my personal site has a half-dozen different comics of various sizes listed on its front

    short comics don't necessarily need this, long ones do!

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  • ɹ uɐp :antifascism:dannotdaniel@hellions.cloud
    Sep 25, 2026, 2:49 AM

    @anthracite @thevhswizard interesting

    in a pure vanilla Mastodon implementation those larger contexts could be threads but a given post would only be part of any one thread, unless you do quote toots

    threads of quote toots might let you stitch things into different contexts but it's a bit of a kludge probably

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  • Herzleidherzleid@wandering.shop
    Sep 25, 2026, 10:47 AM

    @dannotdaniel If you go check out some comics on Tapas, you'll understand why this idea is not the way to go. It needs to be both showroom (similar to image-first Fedi implementations [like Pixelfed, but *not* Pixelfed] yet … more), AND it needs to have an intuitive and searchable archival structure (which I'm not aware of existing in the Fediverse yet; Bookwyrm covers part of it but comics would need something more granular/flexible I think). @anthracite @thevhswizard

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  • Mullanamullana@chaos.social
    Sep 27, 2026, 5:51 PM

    @thevhswizard
    I've been carrying an idea in my head for a long time now to make a Webcomic reader that works like a podcatcher with RSS.

    It would need:
    - an adapted RSS protocol
    - apps for Android and iOS
    - an easy to set up example website where you can read comics, but that also generated valid RSS feeds for the protocol
    - maybe a WordPress plugin (but I've come to hate WordPress recently) or a small CMS

    I'm also an exhausted artist, though. And I already have too little time for comics.

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  • Mullanamullana@chaos.social
    Oct 3, 2026, 3:49 PM

    @0x4d6165
    @thevhswizard

    Yeah, it's basically just RSS, but it should have a few comic specific attributes like reading direction etc.
    You should be able to follow it with a normal RSS reader but have more specific information for dedicated comic readers

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