foss Tachiyomi reader says goodbye after 10 years

[Catt0s]

 

 

Summary

Tachiyomi, a free, open source app for reading Manga, Manwha, Manhua, and comics, has ended development. The app was created 10 years ago, and has hundreds of thousands of users. 

Due to legal action being taken against them by a Korean company, the project has ceased development. 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

With unanimous support from the fellow core contributors and support staff, the core Tachiyomi project will no longer be under active development due to recent events involving Kakao Entertainment Corp's threats to both myself and others that have been involved with the project.

 

 

My thoughts 

Background:

Tachiyomi is split into several parts: 

The reader app, which contains your entries, chapters, and automatically tracks them, and extensions. Extensions get images for the reader to display for sources online, through API or Scraping. Not that Tachiyomi was not affiliated with any sources. 

 

The story, as I experienced it:

At the start of 2024, Kakao asked Tachiyomi to destroy it's repository and all forks. Originally, Kakao alleged that the app was being used to illegally read "Solo Leveling." Kakao provided a list of the offending sources, and the offending sources were promptly removed from the app. However, since it is open source, many users were able to continue using the sources. Kakao asked for further action to be taken, and Tachiyomi removed all Internet sources, forcing users to self host a server (similar to plex). When that was not enough, Tachiyomi deleted all sources, and git history of the repository. The primary app added a feature for users to add third-party extension repositories. 

At this point, a Twitter account with the Tachiyomi logo called "Tachiyomi Community" was continuing to "assist people" with tutorials on how to use new features. While the account is not affiliated with the project, Kakao collected these and threatened the project once again. At this point, the project released a final version, and was archived. 

 

My thoughts on this: Kakao is within their right to go after providers of pirated content. However, Tachiyomi is akin to a browser, are they going to go after Google Chrome next? Was this maliciously used and known to them, and they chose to go after the project rather than the websites? 

 

 

Sources

https://tachiyomi.org/news/2024-01-13-goodbye

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachiyomi?wprov=sfla1

https://github.com/tachiyomiorg

 

 

[Catt0s]

(sorry I typed this on my phone at 1am, corrections and additions welcome)

[Lightwreather]

fwiw, there are alternatives now. Mihon for example has forked the base project and it appears many previous forks of Tachi will be rebasing to mihon

[jaslion]

51 minutes ago, Catt0s said:

My thoughts on this: Kakao is within their right to go after providers of pirated content. However, Tachiyomi is akin to a browser, are they going to go after Google Chrome next? Was this maliciously used and known to them, and they chose to go after the project rather than the websites? 

Its like kodi, stremio,...

 

Basically anything that aggregates ANY content and has 3rd party extension support will be turned into a piracy application.

 

Which well flat out shouldnt matter for the developer since if they aren't involved in this then they shouldn't even be able to be threathend about it.

 

However in the world we live in big companies are mostly free to do whatever so for a small open source dev team the real only way out is to seize all activities because they can never win. Even if they do win and get money from a case the bigger company will make their lives hell forever after. Its basically what always happens.

[SorryBella]

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

 

Which well flat out shouldnt matter for the developer since if they aren't involved in this then they shouldn't even be able to be threathend about it.

Thats the thing, initially these extensions and scrapers are hosted by the Tachiyomi app itself, they are involved in it in some way or another. The initial delisting of extension in apps is purely legalese that they thought they could get away with. Its like if Jellyfin provides you with the ability to scrape Pirate Bay magnet links in-app if you type a movie title in its search bar.

[jaslion]

Just now, SorryBella said:

Thats the thing, initially these extensions and scrapers are hosted by the Tachiyomi app itself, they are involved in it in some way or another. The initial delisting of extension in apps is purely legalese that they thought they could get away with. Its like if Jellyfin provides you with the ability to scrape Pirate Bay magnet links in-app if you type a movie title in its search bar.

Aah ok so I misread that context. Ok yeah then they are complicit

[Lunar River]

well fuck. i use tachiyomi on my tablet. but looks like i can just do a library backup and continue using Mihon.

fuck you kakao

[paddy-stone]

3 hours ago, jaslion said:

seize all activities

Sorry to be a grammar nazi, but the word is cease, not seize 

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, SorryBella said:

Thats the thing, initially these extensions and scrapers are hosted by the Tachiyomi app itself, they are involved in it in some way or another. The initial delisting of extension in apps is purely legalese that they thought they could get away with. Its like if Jellyfin provides you with the ability to scrape Pirate Bay magnet links in-app if you type a movie title in its search bar.

I think this is a very important part to include in the story.

This is not like a browser being taken down because you could use it to download stuff. Tachiyomi was developing, hosting and running some of these services that contributed and encouraged piracy themselves. Then they tried to remove things until the rightsholders were satisfied, but because they had already been targeted and caught with their hand in the cookie jar those excuses/explanations weren't satisfying.

 

If the final version of the app had been the first version of the app, then this would never have happened. Right now they are essentially being punished for their previous actions.

 

I don't think it's fair to hate and blame Kakao for this.

 

Move on, find a new app to use if you want to pirate manga. These things always happen on piracy platforms.

[Catt0s]

6 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

fwiw, there are alternatives now. Mihon for example has forked the base project and it appears many previous forks of Tachi will be rebasing to mihon

yes, there are many forks that exist even if they never officially were "forked" using GitHub. 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I think this is a very important part to include in the story.

This is not like a browser being taken down because you could use it to download stuff. Tachiyomi was developing, hosting and running some of these services that contributed and encouraged piracy themselves. Then they tried to remove things until the rightsholders were satisfied, but because they had already been targeted and caught with their hand in the cookie jar those excuses/explanations weren't satisfying.

 

If the final version of the app had been the first version of the app, then this would never have happened. Right now they are essentially being punished for their previous actions.

 

I don't think it's fair to hate and blame Kakao for this.

 

Move on, find a new app to use if you want to pirate manga. These things always happen on piracy platforms.

 

My client has to often send DMCA's to Android app developers who make such tools because they do exactly the same thing, and our media is free to read (with ads), but the tools just rip the images directly off the site.

 

If the intention was not there to steal the content, then yes "a web browser" would be a fair argument, but it's not. These tools are are closer to streamlink and youtube-dl/yt-dlp which are intentionally designed to steal content from video sources.

 

One could make the argument that such tools are valuable to certain content creators due to the lack of useful tools by the platform to backup their own videos (like good grief, do you see how youtube wants you to get your videos back? 

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?pli=1

 

I have 40TB of videos, you can't realistically expect someone to download it in 50GB chunks. That would be 800 files, assuming you were even getting the original videos back. Can't export that much to a cloud drive service either. Especially if you just want the videos between X and Y date.

 

You would be better off having a tool scrape your account, mark all the private videos as unlisted and download the public-facing highest quality version because the "download link" youtube gives you inside won't be the best version.

 

A similar argument can be made if you were moving your own comic images from site A to site B, because often comics were hosted on CMS's like wordpress which are extremely garbage to manually download assets from, because they're disorganized on disk. even if you downloaded the files yourself, without a tool to read the database and bulk rename things in order, you'll get piles of draft versions thrown in between the actual pages.

 

I assume (because I'm familiar with both Kakao and several Japanese manga publishers interests here) that there reason they've gone after the app is because of the napster argument. The app is merely a front end over ripping services they were providing, and not merely a way to read the site itself.

 

And if that's the case, it's hard to feel sorry for them, they knew they were doing something wrong, and kept doing it anyway. Webtoons isn't exactly an inaccessible service, but it does have a somewhat complicated means of "subscribing" to it.

 

[Catt0s]

7 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Webtoons isn't exactly an inaccessible service, but it does have a somewhat complicated means of "subscribing" to it.

 

The main reasons people pirate manga are:

1. DRM - The accessibility of the apps suck, and they make you read in those. No tracking ability, horrible UI, popup ads, etc. 
2. Translation - This will sound dumb, but the translators who do this for a living are usually worse than the ones who do it for donations. 
3. It is free, and all in one app. 

I see the point you are making here, however the sites Tachi interacts with (Such as Pixiv) host the content. Pixiv, as an example, is a website similar to DeviantArt, used to share artwork. Tachi also has extensions for NHentai and MangaDex, which are usually used for piracy, but sometimes have authors uploading their work. I would also like to point out that the app did not have any ads, and relied on donations from users. 

 

The Tachi app itself is very similar to Plex, as it tracks the media inside of it. The extensions were the problem, but destroying them was not enough for Kakao 

 

 

 

 

 

[SorryBella]

24 minutes ago, Catt0s said:

This will sound dumb, but the translators who do this for a living are usually worse than the ones who do it for donations. 

Oh god if i have to see the made up translation drama of Twitter and Anitube bleeding to here im going to explode. Translations have never been and will never be 1:1, because sentence structures are not only influenced by what the text says, but also the translator's writing styles and the cultural zeitgeist. They are the translator's decision and you are allowed to kick it down with the original with your own understanding of the language if you are actually knowledgeable on why its such an issue beyond "someone else with a severe True Scotsman Fallacy said so".

[Kisai]

26 minutes ago, SorryBella said:

Oh god if i have to see the made up translation drama of Twitter and Anitube bleeding to here im going to explode. Translations have never been and will never be 1:1, because sentence structures are not only influenced by what the text says, but also the translator's writing styles and the cultural zeitgeist. They are the translator's decision and you are allowed to kick it down with the original with your own understanding of the language if you are actually knowledgeable on why its such an issue beyond "someone else with a severe True Scotsman Fallacy said so".

I'm pretty sure "AI translation" is likely going to replace fan translation and scalation. It already works pretty damn well for anime. The problem with Manga/Manhua is that English doesn't fit in the space, so fan translations are pretty obvious because they try to fit too many words into a vertical bubble, but authorized translations change the bubbles because they have access to the original artwork to do so.

 

All the AI translations need is proof-reading, since while it does work, it often hallucinates things that were not heard (anime) or not text (especially with stylistic fonts)

 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, SorryBella said:

Oh god if i have to see the made up translation drama of Twitter and Anitube bleeding to here im going to explode. Translations have never been and will never be 1:1, because sentence structures are not only influenced by what the text says, but also the translator's writing styles and the cultural zeitgeist. They are the translator's decision and you are allowed to kick it down with the original with your own understanding of the language if you are actually knowledgeable on why its such an issue beyond "someone else with a severe True Scotsman Fallacy said so".

Not sure how things are these days, but back when I was reading a lot of manga I thought the official translations were from time to time quite poor. Mind you, this was in like 2014. I don't know how things are these days.

In quite a few cases I don't think it's as simple as "it's a stylistic choice" because there were many cases where I, as someone who knows a bit of Japanese (I've worked and released a few translations of my own) have noticed how the official translations misses quite a lot of important details that some fansubs didn't miss.

Just to be clear, I don't think fansubs are always better, but from my time watching anime and reading manga, if I had to the choice between a fansub and an official dub I would probably pick the fan-made one. 

 

 

This thread made me curious, so I decided to look up some official vs unofficial subtitles and found a perfect example:

 

The left is a fansub and the right is the official subtitle from Crunchyroll.

This is a great example to show in a picture because it is very clear that the text says:

 

~てるみたい

 

That part of the sentence expresses certain doubt in the same way "it seems like" would in English. The official translation makes it sound like Rin told Saitou that she would camp at Fumoto camp today. That is not what happened or was said.

Saitou just says she think Rin is going to camp at Fumoto camp.

 

In this case it probably doesn't matter, but I have seen scenarios where the official translation says for example that someone is dead, only for that character to show up a few episodes later without any strange reaction from the other characters. The fan translation didn't make that mistake because it kept the spirit and intention of the sentence intact, even though it might have gotten a bit wordier or a bit awkwardly phrased.

In a lot of cases it doesn't get wordier or awkwardly phrased either, like in the example above.

 

 

Japanese can be quite tricky to translate, and it seems like some fansubbing groups pay a lot of attention to it, while some official subs sometimes comes across as a bit rushed or lack for care.

 

 

Here is another example where I think the fansub sounds a lot more natural. Again, fansub is on the left and official sub on the right. This is from a different show and a different group:

[Catt0s]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

I'm pretty sure "AI translation" is likely going to replace fan translation and scalation. It already works pretty damn well for anime. The problem with Manga/Manhua is that English doesn't fit in the space, so fan translations are pretty obvious because they try to fit too many words into a vertical bubble, but authorized translations change the bubbles because they have access to the original artwork to do so.

 

All the AI translations need is proof-reading, since while it does work, it often hallucinates things that were not heard (anime) or not text (especially with stylistic fonts)

 

 

I would not doubt if official translators did this. I also know fan translators do this. But like you said, it is far from perfect, and things like slang and wordplay won't work with it. 

 

Personally, I use OCR to read untranslated work all the time. It is quite difficult, because after you wait for it to be done, you have to consider what the non-literal translation could mean. 

 

[williamcll]

On 1/19/2024 at 3:07 PM, Catt0s said:

 

My thoughts on this: Kakao is within their right to go after providers of pirated content. However, Tachiyomi is akin to a browser, are they going to go after Google Chrome next? Was this maliciously used and known to them, and they chose to go after the project rather than the websites? 

 

No they can require chrome to enforce their already Pre-built DRM picture content.

[Mark Kaine]

On 1/23/2024 at 5:39 AM, williamcll said:

No they can require chrome to enforce their already Pre-built DRM picture content.

i think what they're saying is u can use a browser to dl any kind of cracked content  -- and "kakao" can do shit nothing about it