Long term strategies to address bandwidth issues and running costs: MangaDex@Home + Affiliates + BTC

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Edit #3 Response has being fantastic so far for clients, so much so that we have several days of clients waiting for new certs to be generated! We will get to everyone eventually!

As you will no doubt have noticed, since the start of year, many events have occurred which have negatively impacted on the site. Losing CloudFlare at the start of the year was a blow, but that was largely resolved by switching to DDoS-Guard. Losing PayPal as a direct method of support has been somewhat mitigated by accepting Bitcoin. Of course, then came COVID-19, which put the world in quarantine, and that increased our traffic overnight by 15%. Then a month later, MangaRock finally died, and our traffic increased by another 15% overnight. No amount of upgrades could have forseen these increases in the levels of traffic. And lastly, due to factors beyond Path's control, they are no longer able to cache our image archive traffic (but they still provide DDoS mitigation for the image archives, for which we are very grateful for). All of the above has led to dismal loading times for old chapters.

BTC/ETH update

We have received a fair amount of BTC and ETH, so thanks to everyone who went through the effort of obtaining crypto to support us. Recently, the amounts of crypto donations have fallen slightly compared to the earlier months, but for now, it is not a concern, as we have built up a couple of months' buffer again. Please continue to support us with crypto if you can!

Affiliates

Very soon, we will start linking to a few affiliates to see if that can secure our finances for the long term.

But the big news today is...

MangaDex@Home

Today we are super pleased to announce the launch of MangaDex@​Home.

Before I start though, a huge shout out and thank you to the guys who volunteered to help us with the client and backend and managed to get it working in such a short amount of time. Like totally amazing how fast it all came together.

So huge thanks to Fugi, carbotaniuman, serjflint, akiroz, kipukun and charly.

With the launch of this we are hoping to address the bandwidth issues that everyone has being suffering from for a while now. With that said, the project is reliant upon community support via the provision of server bandwidth and hard drive space. So we are looking for volunteers to help host clients and boost the network's infrastructure to be able to cope with the demands that are currently placed upon it.

Here's a quick blurb from the MangaDex@​Home page explaining:

MangaDex@​Home is a P2P (peer-to-peer) system where users will be able to volunteer the usage of either their personal computers or servers to act as cache server nodes to alleviate the stress on our own cache servers. Over time, we envisage that the majority, if not all, of the older chapters will be served by MangaDex@​Home

You will be hosting a client that acts as a P2P system for older chapters. Basically, your machine will act as a server where a tiny portion of older MangaDex chapters will be stored and when a reader wants to read an older chapter, it will be "fetched" from your machine and served to the reader. If you're familiar with torrenting, it is very similar: torrents work by sharing parts of the whole file to other torrent clients in order to ensure download stability and faster speeds.

Since your machine will basically function as a server for MD, we are asking only people who meet or exceed the following criteria run a MangaDex@​Home client for now:

A minimum network speed of 80Mbps up/down.
A minimum of 40GB of dedicated storage space, preferably more.
24/7 availability (This means the machine must be *on* 24/7).

You will be expected to provide an up to date speedtest.net result on request to validate your specs as part of the application process, whether you are in the initial batch or later on.

Note that if you are concerned about the legality of hosting MangaDex's content, consider renting a dedicated server and installing the MangaDex@​Home client there. If you still have concerns about legality, we suggest that you do not host the MangaDex@​Home client at all.

We will be slowly ramping up the amount of people on the network as more clients are added and coverage improves. We are especially keen on SEA clients being added as that is currently a region we have very poor service in. Having a wide range of locations is especially important as requests from users on the network will be routed to the nearest clients to speed up load times so hopefully everyone should notice an improvement. You can try it right now by turning it on in your Mangadex@​​Home options page!

The current status of the network at launch is a combined output of 6650Mbps and over 18TB of cache space from the volunteers who joined us early. Although this sounds impressive we are going to need much more capacity to ensure that we can load chapters reliably for everyone on a global scale. The cache on all clients will need to be built up as they are currently only full of chapters from our internal testing spam, so loading times will improve as more users use the network and start having their chapter requests cached, so worry not if you don't see huge improvements right away.

If you are able and willing to host a client you can find the application form here: client request form. All applications will be replied to eventually, but since we are unsure of how many people will help out it could be minutes to days before we get to all of them! There is also a limit on how many clients we can bring online daily, too, due to cert creation. People hosting a client will be able to display a shiny supporter icon next to their name! You can enable said icon under Supporter settings. People who sign up before the end of this month get a shiny gold badge to display. After the first month, a boring, old, regular, generic one!

edit: Already reached the daily limit for new clients. Will approve more as the limit refreshes!
 
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What hasn't been mentioned is that @Ixlone has been pushing for this for a very long time and staff kinda blew him off. He believed in the meme dream and it's finally come true. We are very excited to be able to read older chapters again!
 
is a Reindeer
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@kuma Users will be able to host their own SEA nodes for MD@H improving the connectivity times for SEA users.
 
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Long live MangaDex@Home, may the cache be with us in our reading sessions. 🤠
 
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Would it be possible to do this without a static ip but with a dedicated domain name?

It should not be hard to do that, in which case there should be a lot more volunteers.
 
Dex-chan lover
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We are especially keen on SEA clients being added as that is currently a region we have very poor service in
it is time-
A minimum network speed of 80Mbps up/down.
nvm
That alone probably disqualify like, 90% of my country. I mean, 3 Mbps up/down is already a rare blessings here.
 
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Question do you have an approximate timeline when you would be lifting the static IP requirement? I have plenty of bandwidth and hard drive space to spare I just don’t have a static IP address. I’m also assuming I’m not the only one in the same boat.
 
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At last M@H actually happens, if only I can contribute to that, but my connection is pretty slow and most of all I can't leave my PC on 24/7 mmm...

I hope it'll go well, and maybe some implementation of perk for doing that will be amazing in the future mmm...
 
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I've enabled M@H, but it doesn't look like images are loading right. Opening an image (https://d9c3nbjmp5v06.2vm9tqsd8f3mc.mangadex.network:1337/data/092bcef1063d769c06475931b0af2bb7/x1.png?t=1591576684939) in a new tab shows that the certificate it is being served with doesn't match with the domain it's actually on (*.2vm9tqsd8f3mc.mangadex.network on the cert). When the SSL error is ignored, it does load fine though.
Edit: I missed the *, and the error is ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. Chrome isn't showing anything in the Certificate Hierarchy like it usually does, besides the leaf certificate. Weird
 
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I'd love to host, but static IP's are hard to come by. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you guys get it working with dynamic IP's, please do update us again. I think that, alone, will weed out most of the people who would like to help.
 
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So when you say p2p, do you mean like server requests will be redirected to us, or will the requests be handled by the server, which requests the file from us.
Also, how similar is this to 'normal' p2p? (as in whether I can run this behind a VPN that allows p2p traffic).
If that is possible, I have plenty of bandwidth and I would be happy to help.
EDIT: nvm on the dynamic lol
 
MD@Home
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I have register previously before Mangadex@Home officially launch. Do I need to register again? I don't see any info on 'Options' tab
 
Group Leader
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That is a pretty strict requirement, I hope MD can find enough people for it...
Also why not just let people download chapters/series they like and torrent them?
 
Fed-Kun's army
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Can you guys get Brave BAT coin verified? I could donate with those if you did.
 
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