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.
This sucks, been using mihon on my ereader pretty much since tachiyomi died. Excellent app that improves on it’s predecessor in pretty much every way and I don’t even use it for piracy directly, I have a komga server that I read from (which tbf is filled with pirated content lmao though I do sometimes buy raws for niche stuff that’s not like chainsaw man).
Best client app around though, imo. Hope they navigate this successfully
Wait, how do you use Mihon to connect to your own server? Do you need to build your own source app for that? Is that what Komga is? Idk please explain. I’m already self-hosting othet stuff.
Install komga, populate it with content (tip: use komf to automatically scrape sites like manga updates for content similar to how Jellyfin scrapes thetvdb), install the komga extension in mihon, point it at your server, profit.
It can even sync read history between the server and device if you configure it as a tracker as well.
https://komga.org/docs/guides/mihon/
https://mihon.app/docs/guides/tracking#enhanced-services
The documentation isn’t super well done so you’ll have to make some leaps of faith but it’s pretty simple to figure out if you can figure out stuff like Jellyfin transcoding. The hardest part to set up is komf, which is optional (though it does make it look much nicer, like you’re browsing mangadex or whatever. Just make sure you don’t point komf at libraries with novels or western comic books or whatever bc it sucks at scraping those).
Also if you setup komf there’s a tampermonkey script that gives you gui control of the setting in the komga ui, very handy, but not strictly necessary
Use runtipi, it has the apps kapowarr and komga already on the appstore, you just setup runtipi either on homepc or server, install the two apps and it should automatically work
runtipi is an open source self hosting panel, like the ones ppl use to setup websites but its made for everyday ppl to setup and launch selfhosted apps.