One year of manga in the books. It has been a trip! Thank you to everybody here for their contributions here. This community has been a joy to be a part of and I don’t remember ever having to step in and swing the moderator hammer around (unlike those naughty anime folks). If you all promise not to tell the anime folks, I have a bit of a confession to make:

Cue the flashback sequence…

When the defederation and blanket content removals happened on the ml instance last year, I was worried that anime/manga content on lemmy was going to be smothered and killed before it ever got a chance to reach enough of a critical mass to maintain its activity. At that time, I was way more into manga than anime and I didn’t want to be forced back onto reddit to talk about it. So, I hatched a plan…

I tried to kickstart the anime community. That might sound strange, but my thinking was that there are way more people out there likely to be watching anime than reading manga. So, if I could get them to consolidate mostly in one place, it would be easier to drag the manga-reading people from that community into the manga-specific community. One thing I find interesting is that the anime and manga communities here on ani.social have roughly the same proportion of active members as the anime and manga subreddits (~3:1 anime:manga). So, there you have it, my main motivation for facilitating anime discussion at the time was to actually talk about manga.

End the flashback sequence…

Thanks for keeping that a secret from all the anime folks! Overall, I think the plan largely worked, but I was also surprised at how many people are active here in the manga community that don’t seem to be active in the anime community. So, thank you to everybody that made the move from the ml community to this one!

There are two other people I want to thank specifically. First is hitagi, who keeps this instance running and has dealt with some serious infrastructure challenges this past year, including an intercontinental migration. The other person I want to thank is the community’s resident villainess, Kadath. She has been gracious enough to bear the dreaded M next to her name and act as a moderator. Thanks to both of you in particular!

There are plenty of other people to thank, especially the “power users” that do most of the actual chapter posting. Thank you all for the contributions you have made to this community. Also, thanks for helping me find some great series to read!

Here is to another year of great manga!

Finally, I will make a similar offer to the anime general thread this week of doing a mini-AMA in this thread for any questions people might have (manga-related or otherwise).