Citing Kotatsu’s recent shut down, two of Mihon’s devs said that misuse of Mihon’s name and branding by a group may endanger the project.
I copied the text if you don’t want to go the link. It’s a bit long so I spoilered it.
spoiler
Hello everyone,
With Kotatsu’s recent shutdown and due to some ongoing issues over the years, I believe Mihon is also under threat. If you care about the project’s future, please take a moment to read this message.
Who is behind the threat, and how?
A group going by iiTachiyomi and recently Miyomi has built a massive following by impersonating Tachiyomi (Mihon’s predecessor) across various platform. They only rebranded to iiTachiyomi after years of request and only on platforms where they had a low following.
Their blatant impersonation was one of the key reason behind the legal threat Tachiyomi received, which ultimately led to its shutdown. When we announced Mihon and exposed their behavior, iiTachiyomi promised to change their ways and not impersonate Mihon.
However, just months after Mihon launched, they resumed the same behavior by:
- Creating a new brand “Miyomi: Tachiyomi and Mihon community” to capitalize on Mihon’s name
- Posting Mihon release notes and announcements without attribution
- Sharing updates of third-party extension repos without attribution
- Failing to clarify they are not the developers behind Mihon or those extensions
- Selling fake Mihon branded merchandise
Why does this threaten Mihon?
When P.CoK, the anti-piracy division of Kakao requested the removal of extensions, the Tachiyomi team complied. iiTachiyomi, however continued distributing them in a misleading way, causing confusion that escalated into legal pressure, which resulted in Tachiyomi shutting down.
Now, they are doing the same thing with Mihon. Their misrepresentation and misuse of Mihon’s name, branding and work puts the project at risk, despite Mihon having already corrected the mistakes Tachiyomi made. It could also cause problems for other apps they promote.
What to do from now on
iiTachiyomi claims to serve the community, but their actions prove otherwise. To protect Mihon:
- Report iiTachiyomi or Miyomi pages that mislead users
- Correct people who confuse Mihon with iiTachiyomi or Miyomi
- Don’t share or support unofficial Mihon merchandise
- Spread the word: Mihon has no connection to them
Signed by:
- Antsy, Mihon Developer
- jobobby04, TachiyomiSY Developer
This is after the action that Kotatsu manga app shutting down due to Kakao’s continued war on manga piracy, and Google’s future policy of limiting what Android users can install on their own devices.
screenshot
Important
In light of recent challenges — including threating actions from Kakao Entertainment Corp and upcoming Google’s new sideloading policy — we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Kotatsu and end its support. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who contributed and to the amazing community that grew around this project.
One year ago, Tachiyomi shut down due to Kakao’s efforts, as per this post here.
Thats the issue I’m running up against, bringing all my oddball suggested titles. Especially ones without English titles.
I’ve long had this problem of tracking the multiple manga (and anime) that I’ve been interested in since the 2010s. Back then there was this one reader site called onemanga and I had all my eggs on that. as usual it had to go down somehow (in their case, money) and that scared me into using MyAnimeList (MAL) and mangaupdates (MU) to track everything. On top of that now I add kitsu.io and anilist now.
I think if you’re going to move manually one by one from kotatsu and mihon, might as well add a couple extra steps to those sites to help track as well. I’ll admit though in terms of esoteric items, kitsu is the least, followed by anilist, MAL then MU as the highest chance to include weird stuff. I have to redo my MU list since I somehow got my old account deleted and who knows what weird manga I’ve tracked that got lost.
For some odd reason koatsu is not keeping my login to kitsu, but I was able to find most of my stuff on mal. Now if I could get mihon to pull from the mal list.
I guess koatsu had it easy where it scraped all the providers and you could choose which to use. As some were chapters behind others.