So, as a moderator for !manga@ani.social, I have been trying to keep tabs on how this has been developing over on reddit (especially /r/manga).

I believe that if a publisher were to request content or posts to be removed, it would most likely be directed to the instance admin. In my community’s case, that would be @hitagi@ani.social. It would then be up to them whether to or how to remove the content. If it isn’t a formal DMCA or if they are in a jurisdiction not bound by the DMCA, then they could always choose not to take action. If they did decide to remove the content, then the next decision facing them would be how to remove it.

One option would be to “remove” it (no different than a community moderator removing things like spam). This action would federate out to other lemmy servers and remove it there as well. The other option that is available to instance admins is to “purge” it. This removes the content from the local server, but does not federate that removal out to other instances. So, the offending content would still be available to the rest of the fediverse since it was federated out and the publisher would have to go play whack-a-mole with every instance out there. The purge option would definitely be the malicious compliance route.

A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.

That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:

General Communities

• !anime@ani.social
• !manga@ani.social
• !lightnovels@ani.social

Series-Specific Communities

• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Delicious in Dungeon community
• !frieren@ani.social - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End community
• !nokotan@ani.social - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• !dandadan@ani.social - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• !dragonball@ani.social - Dragonball community

Misc.

• !vocaloid@ani.social - Very new community just started by @hisao@ani.social about vocaloids. Check it out!
• !vtubervids@ani.social - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• !nokotan@ani.social - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• !dandadan@ani.social - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• !frieren@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community to discuss Japanese anime voice actors behind the scenes and share clips

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).

The project relies on extensions that are installed separately to pull content from different services (mangadex, mangaplus, etc.). The other day, the tachiyomi devs removed almost all the extensions that they were hosting/maintaining after a threat of legal action from a Korean webtoon company. Here is a relevant discussion thread.

Here is a guide to a third party extensions repo that was linked in a discussion thread the other day.

I haven’t personally done this with my Tachiyomi yet, but have heard from others it has worked well.