Re:MangaDex infrastructure overview
by franciscop on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @12:48AM
(#28441036)
From a quick glance it seems to host obviously copyrighted content for free. In some jurisdictions (like Spain) the companies would have a hard time at court against the website creators, since it's a not-for-profit* website sharing culture.
Now show an ad, or premium accounts, and it becomes a for-profit endeavour which is straight jail time. I'm unsure about donations.
(Based on previous rulings I followed ~10 years ago, laws might have changed IANAL yada yada)
*not for profit != non-profit
Re:MangaDex infrastructure overview
by reilly3000 on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @02:01AM
(#28441424)
They might have a play at being affiliates for sellers of the original material. I suppose a link is an ad, but its also somehow a less dubious way to monetize in my mind.
There is the MangaDex@Home, where users can serve part of disk space/bandwidth to help serve (mainly old) manga chapters. It does need to be something that is running 24/7 (e.g.: not a PC that is shutdown frequently), so something like a VPS or a service is recommended.
Virtually every chapter is served via MD@H now.
Client doesn't really need much availability, as long as it can do a graceful shutdown. Even in the event of a sudden shutdown, the trust penalties are much lower than H@H and in practice go away after a trickle of traffic to raise your score
Nice, didn't know about this (there isn't much information about MD@H after the rewrite).
BTW, how can I register my VPS on MD@H? Before we had a dedicated form on the page to register interest, at least after the rewrite I didn't find it. Is it only using something like Discord?
We had a dedicated page for signing up on the v3 version of the site. Currently, yes, it's via our Discord server's MD@H channels.
They had a bit under $80k in crypto in their list of BTC and ETH addresses "leaked" along with the source code when the site was hacked earlier this year.
Re:MangaDex infrastructure overview
by whateveracct on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @12:36AM
(#28440973)
A $5/mo premium plan would break even so quickly
Premium plan on content that can be considered as dubious in copyright context? Seems like a quick way to get shut down.
premium plan on a virtual badge, NFT or whatever crap you want. content would still be freely available for everybody but the infra costs would be a bit less.
>our ~$1500/month budget
I understand not wanting to show ads, but is there no way for the users to contribute to hosting costs?