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The VHS Wizard 🦝📼🧙@thevhswizard@retro.pizza (2026-09-24 22:54:49)
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
---Reply---
Space Catitude 🚀@TerryHancock@realsocial.life (2026-09-25 00:24:58)
@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?

---Replies---

will have been preventable@virtulis@loud.computer (2026-09-26 12:00:27)
@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.