On January 5, 2024, MangaDex along with a couple of other extensions were removed from the tachiyomi-extensions repository, as per a request by Kakao Entertainment. Coincidentally, this request came right before the anime adaptation of Solo Leveling started airing. A couple of days later, on January 9, an official post was made on the Tachiyomi website, explaining that extensions were purged from the repositories, and a way to add external extensions was added to the app. On January 13, another official post was made announcing the discontinuation of development of Tachiyomi. Following this, another announcement was made, announcing that some developers will fork the project, its issues, pull requests, etc., and continue developing Tachiyomi under the name Mihon. I wish the best for all the developers, but I don't have high hopes, as arkon - the main developer quit.
I remember when MangaDex was having problems with its backend, getting DDOS'd very often and even had a data leak and eventually had to take down the site, until they revamped their systems. /a/utists wanted to make their own, new and improved manga hosting/reading site. Nothing aside from a bunch of potential logos, names, and front-end only applications came out of it. I even got a 3-day ban because I made one of the threads as people from the IRC were busy. Eventually, those threads were banned from /a/, people (and the threads) moved to /g/ where people didn't care as much, and development eventually came to a halt.
I'm not a big fan of MangaDex. I think it works and provides a (technically) usable experience, but it has a horrible web UI, even worse mobile UI, and the content on the site is filled with slop. I don't mean slop in the way that most manga on the site is of low quality, I don't necessarily care about that, but unfortunately, over the years, just like other sites you can go to read manga, MangaDex has become dominated by Chinese and Korean comics. I'm sure you can find manga that has a different original language than those three too, but I digress. In other words, MangaDex, along with other manga sites, is dominated by slop!
Ordinarily, I wouldn't talk about tangentially related topics such as this in one post, but the solution for both is (or rather was) the same thing - gatekeeping. I didn't mention this, but the reason Tachiyomi had to stop its development was due to the attention-seeking behavior of a normalfriend. A twitter account I will not mention was providing guides on how to restore functionality of the extensions/how to add 3rd party to his fanbase of other normalfriends who are so tech illiterate they can't find easily available information via a simple search. Bottom line is, these normalfriends are also the people who are reading slop available on MangaDex and similar websites. Personally, I started using Tachiyomi when I was in high school (for reference, during this time, arkon wasn't the main developer - inorichi was). Back then, I was not a software developer, yet I was still smart enough to use Tachiyomi to read manga, set up an RSS feed for seasonal anime, etc. I was not a brainlet who needed people to spoonfeed me in order to get through life. Unfortunately, that's not most people and even though I'm not a big fan of private trackers and whatnot, these recent news has justified the existence of them in my eyes. The worst part is, there's nothing that can be done anymore.
