It's been a couple of weeks since the 10th Onion Comic Market wrapped up, so it's high time to summarize how the event went, what worked, what didn't, and what to expect for next time.

HOW IT WENT

Past Onionkets have had their share of technical hiccups… I'll never forget the time when the latest version of OnionShare spontaneously broke, forcing the hasty creation of a "how to roll back your version" page and multiple panicked e-mails sent out before the days of the event. Thankfully nothing that disastrous happened to us this time around, and everything from catalog creation to circle page hosting went (mostly) smoothly.

We once again had 10 participating circles (including my own), and I'm happy that we've maintained that number and established a core group. In terms of attendees, the livestreams saw their usual amount of traffic… about a dozen people on PeerTube, and about 8 people from Pomf. Chat was quite lively as well, which was very positive to see.

In terms of site traffic, my own site seemed to get between 30 to 50 visitors total, with at least one other circle reporting about the same. So things on the audience side also seem about the same compared to the past few events. So all in all, I'm happy with where things stand.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

As the screenshot from Unifans attached to this post makes clear, there was unfortunately no interest in the Unifans fiat/crypto bridge idea. This wasn't exactly a surprise… this was an experiment to begin with, and I realize that out of the small audience we have, the number of people willing and able to donate to the artists is a fractional minority, and the people willing to sign up to some website and punch in their payment information is a fractional minority of THAT.

I had hoped that leaving the option available might have been useful to somebody out there who wanted to donate but couldn't, but that seems to have been wishful thinking on my part. I'm unsure whether we should keep trying to use it, or just give up on the idea. I'll probably leave the account active as a donation bucket for anybody who stumbles across it, but using it as a proxy payment is going to stay on the backburner for the foreseeable future.

For those of you who DO have magic internet shekels, the Onionket Mitra of course remains online for you to follow, subscribe, or donate to your favorite artists as you please. Check out our Mitra page for more info on how to sign up if you haven't already.

PR; TO ADVERTISE OR NOT TO ADVERTISE?

I'm still on the fence about how aggressively (if at all) we ought to be advertising to attract more artists and/or audience members… on the one hand, it would be nice to see the event expand beyond just the core group, and draw in a bigger audience. But on the other hand, drawing more attention to ourselves might end up doing more harm than good given the climate online these days.

Trying to find like-minded communities to advertise in is surprisingly difficult. The open-source software communities aren't always that interested in sexy drawings, and the sexy drawing communities unfortunately seem to react negatively to privacy and pseudonymity tech.

Up till now, the event has mostly been advertised via Fedi, on my own personal TwiXxer account, and on message boards/communities. Unfortunately, the latter option is drying up these days. "All The Fallen" (ATF), for example, has announced that it'll be closing its doors soon, and even before that they banned all mention of private messengers, mostly due to abuses that they unfortunately allowed to fester for too long. New communities and message boards are springing up to replace it, but as previously mentioned, their moderation teams tend to react negatively to any mention of Tor, or cryptography, or the dark web in general.

I still maintain that these are useful technologies, and allowing their abusers to define them for everybody means giving up a useful tool for no good reason. But unfortunately, few people seem to want to listen these days. The aggressive age verification push spreading across the Net may help change attitudes, though, and there's every possibility people will come around on privacy, cryptography, and pseudonymity. So I haven't fully given up hope.

NEXT ONIONKET

Since the level of participation and audience interest has maintained itself, there will of course be an Onionket 11. Following the usual pattern, it will be hosted in August of 2026, after Tokyo Summer Comiket is over. More details will be posted on our webpages.

Thank you again to everyone, artist or audience member alike, for making another Onion Comic Market possible. I had a good time hosting it, I hope you all had a good time participating in it, and here's hoping we can have just as much fun next time we all get together to say NO to censorship.