Hello Lemmings.

I will be attempting to make a federated anime tracker this summer, but I am not quite sure what features people would want and how I would get the details for animes, mangas, etc.

For the latter: What I thought was to either scrape other anime websites continuosly in the background, but this most likely is against the ToS of every anime tracking website, such as AniList or MAL. (I actually asked anidb.net for special access to their DB because apparently you can request access to it, but I’ve been left on read by the two staff members) My second idea was to make it an anime tracker website where animes are only user-submitted. And the user submissions would be approved by assigned moderators. However, I think this would be quite inconvenient. I’d like to get your opinions and/or ideas for this.

For the former: So if you have any requests or suggestions, please drop it down in the comments section.

Thanks in advance.

  • gomp@lemmy.ml
    8·
    1 year ago

    but this most likely is against the ToS of every anime tracking website

    AFAIK scraping publicly accessible websites is fine in most countries (IANAL, look into it)

    • asudox@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Ok cool, so even when that is out of the way, are the images copyrighted? Because I’d like to download the images and host them on my servers.

    • asudox@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure that I/someone could just fork this project once it’s done and make a few changes to it to make it a audiovisual content tracker.

      • Temperche@slrpnk.net
        3·
        1 year ago

        I think the biggest challenge will be to standardize the scraping process since databases for audiovisual content are very differently structured. Will probably require database-by-database API access/negotiations so that you know how their databases are structured - completely FOSS audiovisual content databases are rare.

  • typhoon@lemmy.world
    61·
    1 year ago

    Decentralizing the database in a federated structure for anime tracking is a very good idea. Right now I’m using Anitrend that is open source but is only a interface to Anilist.

    Like you pointed I think the major challenge will be to establish a solid new shows database entries police(s). Not sure how we could manage that effectively. Governance will be key but you also don’t want to be a hostage of this project for your life.

    One aspect to be taken in consideration is privacy. I think a lot of people would appreciate to have access to the new tracker without having to share anything about them.

    • asudox@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Oh well, no. The database won’t be decentralized. That just invites chaos. Bookwyrm did that and now there are lots of duplicates in their library, which I definitely want to avoid. The things that will be federated are animes’ forums (as communities in Lemmy for example), and those communities will have threads that will be either a forum thread or a review which others can comment on from any federated platform. Some other things might get federated in the future.

      I decided to just scrape either MAL alone or multiple sources.

      If you have any ideas on how the database can be decentralized while efficiently avoiding duplicates and spam, please do say it.

  • pedroapero@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 year ago

    I had a try ad Bookwyrm, which seems similar to what you intend to build. I was disappointed because the database itself is federated, meaning it’s full of duplicated entries.

    • asudox@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Correct. I thought there was some way to prevent those duplicates because of the federation, but apparently there’s no such check being done so it’s all duplicates. For that reason I won’t put any effort into making the database federated. Only threads, reviews and comments will be federated. This might change as I make it though. There are also clubs in MAL which I might copy and implement in this project and they could be federated as well.