Discussion Thread
Hello fine people of this lovely community. Like normal, this thread is the place to collect all your random anime thoughts, hot takes, and questions. Some example conversation starters:
- I really liked Rent a Girlfriend and was wondering what to watch next?
- My brain is too smooth to understand Evangelion. ELI5?
- My Neighbor Totoro is a trash movie. Allow me to count the ways…
- Is there any news about a season 2 of Usagi Drop? I really love where the manga goes after the anime and wanted to know when it might get adapted.
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
Mod Update
Mod update time! Firstly, I want to thank everybody that has been engaged with this community over the past two weeks as we have brought this place to life. Did you know that this community is now one of the most active communities local to ani.social? It’s true! We have certainly come a long way from where we started and there was just a couple months-old posts gathering dust. Thank you again to everybody involved so far, and here is to a healthy, active community going forward.
Now, it’s serious mod time. There are a couple things I wanted to get the community’s feedback on. If you don’t want to post a comment publicly in this thread, feel free to pm me (if you can, sorry kbin users).
Question 1
- How does the community feel about posts for shows like “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off”?
I hadn’t been posting news about the show because I haven’t really wanted to invite the debate that always seems to pop up about what is or isn’t anime. I am inclined to lean towards a broad definition of anime and would include shows like this, Avatar, Star Wars Visions (at least season 1), etc. However, if the community here feels strongly otherwise, here is your chance to let me know.
Question 2
- How are people feeling about having this community and the episode discussion community separate?
Other forums (reddit, ml pre-defederation) have tended to combine episode discussion threads and the news/updates/discussion threads into a single community. I personally think it makes it difficult for people to find the episode threads when they are separate and there is very little engagement with them. However, I also have liked how having them separate keeps this community more focused and the feed is less cluttered without a ton of episode threads each day. I am wondering if something like a weekly pinned megathread with links to aired episode discussion threads in this community might be a technical solution and the best of both worlds. This will need to be incorporated into the discussion bot, so it will have some lead time before it can be implemented. At this point, I am just brainstorming.
That is all for now (I say after typing out way too much text). Like always, feel free to reach out to the mod team with any issues or report posts/comments if they break the rules. As the community grows more active, it becomes harder to proactively see all the activity that is going on. Fortunately, there haven’t really been any issues within the community yet. All of you are awesome!
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Caution ahead, this comment gets supremely nerdy, even by our standards.
Alright, rather than write about episodes/shows I watched this past week, I thought I would give a bit of an update about one of the other things I have been doing related to anime this past week. Specifically, I have been learning how to use ffmpeg to create high-quality webms to post as clips. The most comprehensive set of guides I found was on animethemes.moe. Some things they include are still not working on my end (specifically audio normalization), but that isn’t as important for my purposes as it is theirs, so I decided my process was good enough.
The first clip I created, I posted to catbox. However, I found out that catbox is region blocked in several regions as well as blocked by certain ISPs. This led me to look into finding an alternative. After some searching, I opted to set it up myself by spinning up a VPS running Chibisafe in a docker. I wasn’t sure how a single-core cheap VPS would handle video streaming, so I opted to stick it behind Cloudflare’s service to help with content caching and distribution. Before I started this, I didn’t realize that Cloudflare would cache and serve webm files. So, it turns out that streaming a video clip from my server means that pretty much nobody ever has to actually stream from my server. Instead, they are just getting the cached video from Cloudflare’s CDN. This makes my teeny-tiny server able to serve content to as many people as I want without any issues.
I had this all set up (with a brand new domain as well) by the time I had created my second clip and after quite a bit of testing on my end, it all seemed to work fine. A side-effect of having these clips served via Cloudflare is that I can actually see some basic analytics about the traffic. So, when I posted my most recent clip, I kept an eye on the cloudflare dashboard periodically out of curiosity. Here are the stats for the 24 hours after I posted it. Turns out that it had ~700 views while having <10 upvotes. I hadn’t realized how many lurkers there were in a community like this one. So, if you have read this far and haven’t logged in and/or don’t vote/comment on anything, hi! I see you!
I have more clips prepared and ready to post. I am trying not to inundate the community with them and instead holding them in reserve for slow news days. If you feel like I am posting them too often, let me know. Clips I have prepared already that you should look forward to come from Zombie Land Saga, Baccano!, Azumanga Daioh, and Samurai Champloo. The longest part of the process is actually finding a 1-2 minute self-contained bit that would make a good clip.
Just one last bit of interesting info from this is that Cloudflare will also show the top 5 countries where traffic is coming from. You can see the snapshot here. I hadn’t realized how US-heavy the traffic in this community was. So, that was interesting.
Hopefully Lemmy gets some kind of video upload feature with customizable ffmpeg commands (and thumbnails for videos).
Thanks for the thread, your contributions, and your support!
Before I answer the questions you mentioned, I guess I’d like to briefly share that I started watching Madoka Magica today. I don’t know why I didn’t watch this earlier despite knowing that Shaft worked on this. But I’m glad I started. It feels really refreshing to see the same surrealism from the Monogatari Series with a different cast of characters and a different set of themes. Hearing Chiwa Saitou’s voice is also a treat.
Now to answer questions brought up for this week:
How does the community feel about posts for shows like “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off”?
I have not watched it but judging from the Wikipedia page, seeing that it’s co-produced by a Japanese studio, I assume that’s the basis for including it. Defining anime certainly is difficult especially in the global context. Personally, I’m not opposed to broader definitions but I do think it’s worth discussing over and over.
How are people feeling about having this community and the episode discussion community separate?
I don’t have any strong opinions regarding this. I do agree though that engagement is low but that could also result from !anime@lemmy.ml simply having more subscribers and people choosing to engage there instead. People are unlikely to repost their comments to another community. The situation is kind of tricky honestly.
Thanks for the feedback!
I think for now, in the absence of more feedback, the working definition of anime that can be included here would be “Does it have an AniList or MAL page?” If you take Scott Pilgrim for example, it has an AniList page, but not a MAL page. Alternatively, Star Wars Visions has pages on both for season 1 which was made entirely by different Japanese studios, but neither has a page for season 2 because only one episode from that season was made by a Japanese studio. And finally, a show like Avatar, clearly animated in an anime style, doesn’t have a page on either, so would not be included here.
As for the episode discussions, I think we will let things ride with the current status quo for now as the community is still growing and settling in. This is definitely something on my mind for the future though. I have had long conversations with @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org about bot functionality and episode threads prior to the defederation. I anticipate some more conversations in the future.
Just for the record: my home instance has been having login & federation issues because it upgraded to Lemmy v0.19 early. I’m kind of stuck in a holding pattern for now because anything I write has a fairly high chance of not appearing for the intended recipient(s). I suspect the same will happen with this reply… but feel free to let me know if this message happens to survive the journey.
Fortunately this one made it through. The 0.18 to 0.19 transition is going to break lots of stuff. Reminds me of how drawn out and painful the python 2 to 3 transition was.
“Does it have an AniList or MAL page?”
So does that mean Chinese animation is counted as anime and thus permitted here? Since those generally do get both Anilist and MAL pages despite no Japanese involvement.
I am fine with donghua being posted (it is also included on the sidebar). If, in some hypothetical future, the community grows large enough, it might make sense to split donghua into its own community (or if the volume of donghua posts grows disproportionately), but for now things are small enough that I am not going to turn away the content. There are examples of donghua that have garnered mainstream anime fanbases (Link Click comes to mind), so I would think the community here would have some interest in it.
