Tachiyomi – It's Joever | Hacker News Reader

Tachiyomi – It's Joever

tachiyomi.org

241 pointsf_devd72 comments

Tachiyomi is probably the best, most full-featured manga reader on mobile or desktop. The code is also clean and easy to maintain, a feat that I can only credit to the amazing developers leading the project.

This will definitely not be the death of Tachiyomi though. There were periods of time where upstream was on hiatus and development soldiered on in community forks (see https://tachiyomi.org/forks/). At some point I even maintained a fork myself that gained some momentum (eventually had to give up due to time constraints). Anyways, many of these forks are still well-maintained to this day so I'm sure users will always have somewhere to go.

Tachiyomi is dead, long live Tachiyomi!

Chiming in with my favourite "fork" (it's a compatible reimplementation rather than a fork) here: https://github.com/Suwayomi/Suwayomi-Server

It's a server version of Tachiyomi. It supports all the same extensions as the actual app, but allows me to access it from anywhere since it runs on my homelab. And with https://github.com/Suwayomi/Tachidesk-Sorayomi I even get iOS support. Awesome project and highly recommend it.

How does Suwayomi compare to komga? Now realizing there are a few players in the space

I haven't tried komga, but the main draw of Suwayomi is that it supports Tachiyomi extensions, so in theory supports every site that Tachiyomi did.

I couldn't get Suwayomi to work properly on my homelab without a desktop install. I found Komga easier to use with local files (Suwayomi is great for accessing online sources).

Kavita trumps them both in this regard, though it has a few problems with automatic identification. Files have to be rigorously organized.

Mango is not as fully featured as them.

There excist a komga plugin for tachiyomi and forks

Nice, I'll be trying this. I recently bought a 1L mini PC for home-server usage. It was very cheap and came with an 8th gen intel, only problem is no space for a 3.5 inside but I'll just connect through USB 3.1 on one of those caddys. It's more than enough for home usage. Running starr apps and jellyfin no problem.

Other alternatives

Mangayomi

Kotatsu (quite good)

Suwayomi (more setup required)

This saddens me greatly. In my opinion, Tachiyomi is a crown jewel amongst mobile applications — a lot of my friends have not switched to iOS because of it, which should tell you something. I would like to thank the creators and everyone else who worked on Tachiyomi and wish them good luck with whatever comes next for them. Their work has made a small, but significant impact on me both as a manga reader and as a developer.

I'm one of those that cited it as literally one of two apps that I will never switch to iOS over. I sincerely hope the community picks it up and continues it. It's easily one of the best apps I've ever used.

Same here. Been on android for several years now mostly because of Tachiyomi (and also KeepassDX, which is an amazing keepass implemenation for Android. I recommend you check it out if you are a keepass user).

Which apps? Maybe KOREADER, eInkBro, Infinity for reddit? On iOS side I love Overcast for podcasts.

Vanced/ReVanced is the other. Cannot stand using YouTube without adblock and sponsorblock.

Yattee on iOS is pretty good. It connects to Piped and Invidious instances.

Have you tried Tachimanga? It’s pretty much Tachiyomi for iOS, and it’s in the appstore

This sicks, Tachiyomi is one of the few applications that make me value having a smartphone over a normal cellphone.

Fortunately it's OSS and there are various forks already, so it's a bit of a youtube-dl situation.

But the difference is the company behind (kakao) collected information about every contribution and want sue everyone that was part of this project.

How would this work exactly? It's like suing qBittorrent's contributors because some people use it for copyright infringement. AFAIK, Tachiyomi extensions maintainers are independent from the core maintainers.

They also got the contributors of the extensions repository. Tachiyomi had one big monorepo where most of the extensions were being developed. So it'd be pretty easy to get the list of extensions contributors.

For Kakao it doesn't matter, just threaten to make people have to lawyer up and many will say 'screw it, this ain't worth it', and go do something else with their time.

The way Tachiyomi worked is that it used specially written extensions to automatically connect to different web sites that provide access to manga and download from them. I mean simply saying it worked kinda like web browser except if you had to download search engines yourself. And in that comparison any legal threats against it looked very dumb. Like someone said "If Warner Bros sued Google Chrome because it gives access to piracy sites". With last update they even completely removed direct access to download these extensions and instead you have to manually provide link to third-party repo with them. I really thought that big change would safe Tachiyomi from any legal trouble for a long time

I had an old fire tablet that I used exclusively for tachiyomi for years with thousands of webtoons and managa and the newer versions stopped working on it so I effectively did the same but I just paid for a proper scraping service instead of rolling my own useragent/cloudflare/bot evader solution and use my myanimelist and a json file to pull latest stuff couple times a day and send a telegram message so I know what I can read at nights. All this sits on a private $7 droplet and a dead simple flutter shell to list and set the reading type and order (ltr, single scroll) etc... love it.

"Warner sues google"

honestly it's more like the police raid a drug cartel but only take the shelves away - you've made it more difficult to organize my shit but you better believe nobody is going to suddenly not get their hands on the goods

One thing that I feel is missing is some sort of BitTorrent for git repositories, git already work quite well in a distributed environment, but it would help to have some ability for being able to push/pull in background, that would make code projects much harder to shutdown, the closest I have seen is a git repos hosted on tor hidden service, but it adds a lot more friction.

I recently installed Tachimanga, an iOS fork of Tachiyomi and was quite surprised to see it allowed on the App Store.

I haven’t tried any other comic reader, but I didn’t find the reading experience anything extraordinary. But it comes with access to bunch of extensions that all can download comics in high resolution for free.

The list of extensions are pulled from GitHub in an attempt to not have them stored in app, but it’s also the first thing it does, so any reviewer would necessarily have to download these too.

I’m not surprised they’ve been legally hunted by some publishers.

The reading experience on official webtoon apps is bad. Webtoon doesn't let you scroll within an episode, Tapas is buggy, both have horrible recommendation functions that shove more or less NSFW things (especially tapas) into your face without regard for your reading history or interests. The download limitations (like pay and access for a limited time, time limit on local download) that are certainly legally circumventable, at least in the EU.

I don't mind paying the creators and publishers, but I do mind being fenced in unwieldy apps.

Really sad day for manga enthusiasts on Android. Tachiyomi was one of the most usable apps to read comic books and manga through local source and Komga. It is extremely easy to use and was literally the app to stay on Android.

I'd like to wish better times to developers and contributors in future. You did an incredible work that a lot of people loved to use.

Interesting. First time I've seen a Korean company being the threatening legal aggressor.

I wonder what even got their attention.

Most likely, they went hunting for infringing manhwa[0] pirates, found someone using Tachiyomi to read downloaded pirate manhwa, and threatened Tachiyomi with baseless litigation.

Or at least, my assumption was that Tachiyomi is just a gussied up PDF reader, which would make the litigation baseless. If they'd specifically added features for piracy or advertised the ability to use Tachiyomi to read manhwa owned by Kakao Entertainment Corp, then yes, there'd be some basis to this. However, even if it isn't baseless, most Americans are financially precarious enough that merely stepping inside a courtroom would bankrupt them. Having to defend against a copyright lawsuit is out of the question, especially an international[2] one.

As for what's going through Kakao's head? Something between "get off my lawn" and "fuck you, pay me". This isn't a Japanese, Korean, or even East Asian thing. That's just how copyright works, and it's been that way for centuries. If anything you can say it's an American export, because Walt Disney is a horrible person, but that point's already been beaten to death here.

[0] Korean for "manga"[1]

[1] Japanese for "manhwa"[0]

[2] The lawyers in the room will object to my use of the word 'international' here. In reality, either Kakao sues in the jurisdiction of the developers directly, or they sue in South Korean courts and get the judgment domesticated into each developer's jurisdiction. The right to do either is a fundamental part of basically every free-trade agreement ever, so this is an implementation detail.

They had extensions to enable the reading of the content, I'm surprised that they didn't strike earlier.

Those extensions were just glorified api clients / web browsers. This is akin to a company threatening the developer of a torrent client.

This. It's open source so I highly recommend people take this into their own hands and clone the repo. There's many forks people use anyway such as TachiyomiAz.

Keeping this thing working is trivial. Anyone with basic html and css knowledge can edit plugins.

Don't forget that forks on GH get deleted too so make sure to make a new repo.

It’s more like a torrent client that has thepiratebay built into it. The main point of Tachiyomi is to have easy access to pirated content directly in the app. Tachiyomi without extensions is useless.

Another analogy: An emulator that also displays all ROMs and lets you play them directly. It downloads ROM from various websites, similar to Tachiyomi.

Did they enable reading of content that you couldn't already access with just a web browser?

My perception was that if it was behind even a basic login, you wouldn't be able to use Tachiyomi to view it unless you had an actual login yourself.

If the extensions are specifically intended for pirate sites, that could be construed as the Tachiyomi developers inducing their users' infringement. If Chrome stuck bookmarks to pirate sites in the default user profile they'd be liable, too.

Absolutely devastating-- Tachiyomi has been my go-to manga reading app for years. It's also one of the most polished open source projects out there and I frequently recommended it, even to those who don't even know what open source is. Thank you to every contributor who put their blood, sweat, and tears into each release of the years. I wish it didn't have to end like this!

As for Kakao, going after the maintainers like this was absolutely disgusting especially after they purged the extensions. I don't even think the music industry went after torrent clients, so they're somehow even worse. A part of me wishes they were able/willing to fight this with support from the EFF or some other org with a dog in this fight.

Korea in much stricter on Copyright issues, and Kakao is losing 10 millions USD on webtoons yearly.

What do you mean by losing 10 millions USD on webtoons? genuinely asking

I'm too lazy to find the source again in Korean media, but they've bet heavily on the Webtoon craze, trying to compete with Naver. I don't know the details, but from what I can see from Naver, this means paying professional artist teams to make higher quality content , e.g. by turning light novels into webtoons and manhwa, hiring editors to coach young artists, spending on marketing and delivery, sponsoring well-known artists and licensing content from other players and maybe paying for anime adaptations.

They also acquired quite a few publishers in the last few years. From what I gather, it doesn't pay off (yet?), in part because they have relatively few paying readers (pay or wait until free model). Nonetheless, they're still investing in the sector. The recent push against piracy is to protect Solo Leveling, one of their few cash cows.

I don't know how the corporate turmoil of the mother corporation plays into that (Kakao does mainly Music entertainment), or if it is even above the noise among Korean scandals but it certainly doesn't help.

All of this in the Korean context where copyright is taken very seriously.

Man all my favorite Android apps are getting sniped. First Infinity for Reddit, now Tachiyomi. These apps are important since official apps don't have e ink optimizations (aka disable animations).

Sad, removing built in extensions earlier this week seemed like admission of guilt, at least read like the kind of concessions that would be favourable to kaka case and bite tachiyomi in ass.

This kind of stuff is why I use a downloader for my manga, and then host it all on a Kavita instance on my homelab, with a cloudflare tunnel for external access.

Any recommendations on sources for something similar? I've got most of the system set up for the reading side, just surprised at how few good sources seem to be easily findable.

If you mean sources for getting the mangas, I recommend HakuNeko.

Disgusting conduct on Kakao's part. It won't effect their bottom line, but I'll personally work hard to never give them a cent now.

Isn't this the same fair use argument. Why is this app getting sued for same thing.

This seems much more like Big Guy and Little Guy.

And Little Guy just doesn't have the money/resources to fight, even thought they are right.

""The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database""

It was always subpar, not because of anything Tachiyomi did but because of the inherent unreliability of pirate manga sites and their low resolution downscales. Maybe this incident will encourage some of you to self-host your own manga streaming website (for personal use).

From my experience looking at some free chapters on multiple sites, the don't serve any high resolution images for chapters either. Though I haven't checked any SFW manhwas sites for this so. And most piracy sites just compress them with jpeg or webp, they don't usually touch the resolution of the images.

It's because you didn't used good sources. I'm using tons of good sources and I don't have any issue.

Any recommendations on sources? I'd love to jump in but don't seem to be having much luck on sources in particular. Assuming most of them are of the private variety.

One of the biggest rule of tachiyomi is to not share sources. Sharing it especially on a crowded forum like this can increase the traffic and make the source block tachiyomi.

Here how I get a good source: - I follow the watermark of the thing I'm reading, often the scanlation team have their own website and it has an extension available for it. - The scanlation team put the first chapters on mangadex (maybe as an ad ?), once I get their name, same thing, I'll try to directly get from them.

It saddens me deeply, but in some way this was inevitable. Thank you to all contributors. And thanks to anyone who wishes to continue helping a fork.

tachiyomi has fallen, billions must go outside

Can they sue Google or MS, since manga can be viewed in their web browser?

Honestly, the Tachiyoma model can easily be legitimized. I'm more than willing to accept sources that add ads or even payment options to support the licensed material, but I want to use a solid reader that is user friendly and not enshitified.

I'm looking

I always found it awkward to import manga from local sources. I prefer buying and reading physical copies.

o7 F

Do we need to make a joe Biden joke while we're at it?

I think the "joever" has been detached somewhat from it's original meaning (I for one did not know where it came from until right now)

how is it even funny if you don't know what it means?

idk man, humor is subjective. Sometimes the most random stuff can get a laugh.

Slang and snowclones and memes often are detached from their originally meaning.

"So long, and thanks for all the X", "grok", "long time no see", "catch 22" etc are all expressions that are commonly used by people who may not be familiar with their origin.

Long time no see has a popculture origin!?

no, but it was (supposedly[0]) some native american english pidgin.

I only meant that most people don't think they're citing native americans speaking broken english when using it today.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/104145/what-is-t... someone says it was popularized by detective stories in the '40s tho :)

It's basically a perfect translation of Chinese 好久不见

In the future, humour will be randomly generated

At this point, it's just a meme. No more about Joe Biden than pogchamp is about Ryan "Gootecks" Gutierrez.

Thought it was a Jojo reference or something. Either way, you chose to be offended.

We do, because it's so joever

we're sooo barack

Well, the inverse is "we're so Barack".

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