Happy Birthday! It has been one year since I made the first general discussion post in this community. Back then, this community newly created with a whole 1 subscriber and active member - me. Since then, we have grown to be the most active general manga community on lemmy. I didn’t do that on my own, so I want to thank everybody that has contributed over the past year to make this community what it has become today.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, you can absolutely use this thread the same way you would use any other general discussion thread. Let us know about things you have read, ask about things you want to read, show off some new volumes you just got, whatever. Go wild! (within the rules)
Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).
wjs018@ani.social 2 weeks ago
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).
Unboxious@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Well I guess if you’re offering… does wjs stand for anything in particular? Or is that too private a question?
wjs018@ani.social 2 weeks ago
The username wjs018 was actually given to me by my undergrad university. When I went to university was the first time I actually had an email address, so I just had all my usernames just stick with it ever since then. The letters correspond to my initials and I think the 018 was just a random number used to disambiguate people with the same initials.
SatouKazuma@ani.social 2 weeks ago
I’m around as well if you need any help with the anime or manga communities. I’m tinkering around with the Pythorhead library to see if there’s anything I can do on that end.
Endmaker@ani.social 2 weeks ago
communists…
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’s me, I’m one of those not active on the anime side (even if I tried early on). In my case it comes to two things:
I’m still planning to join in from time to time whenever I have something to talk about and I’d like to suggest/run a rewatch or two in the future but that’ll have to wait for now. Need to sort out the boring IRL stuff first for that.
Anyway, thanks again to both you and @PrincessKadath@ani.social for running the joint as well as admins for giving it a place to thrive in the first place.