Inspired by a conversation over in the Cartoonists United discord and of my forever fascination with data for comics, I made a free tool called Tag Stats Compare. Very unique, I know.
You can find an online version here, but you can also download it and run it locally.
In a nutshell: this pulls publicly-facing data from Bluesky and Mastodon tags you’ve used and charts them so you can see how well certain posts have done over time. This is aimed particularly at other webcomic creators who use specific tags to promote or track their own comics. Fellow webcartoonist Lan of The Titan (read it!) mentioned doing this by manually going through his Bluesky tag, writing down numbers, then manually plotting a chart and the techie demon in my brain immediately thought: “there’s probably a way to automate this, right?“. So I spent an hour busting out some javascript for this.
It handles both Bluesky (the social media of choice of many webcartoonists) and Mastodon (the social media choice of real freaky webcartoonists) because I cannot resist the chance to shove federated tools into everything I do. You can even compare the two if you use both. You can switch graph type, metric, and range in the top section in case you want a quick glance at things.
Below that is a calendar for more specific views and the data for those time periods itself. It links to each post automatically too, so you can go down the row to see if there’s anything in common with your highest ranking ones.
If you selected the ‘tally top engagers’ tab at the top, you’ll also be able to view your top 25 likers (I don’t know a better word for this), reposters, quoters, and repliers. Quoters doesn’t seem to be working for Mastodon yet so I need to poke at that, but it isn’t a huge emergency since there’s much less of that on the fediverse. You can also download all this data as a .csv in case you’d like to do your own data analysis, or, again, download the tool itself to run locally on your computer.
Before anyone asks: no, I’m not making this for Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram/etc, as the key feature in this is the data being openly and easily readable, which is unique to both ATproto/fediverse sites. Not much I can really do about that!
And one last note: it should go without saying really that this is entirely for data examination purposes, and that you should not take to heart the size of the number on a particular post of yours. A big number does not indicate that someone is a better artist, and a smaller number does not indicate a personal failing. Numbers are fake. Online fame is fake. This tool is for people who are able to internalize that and are purely interested in metrics without considering low performance to be some kind of moral failure.
Anyway. Here’s the link to it again! And I’ve made a new blog category specifically for the weird little tools I make for other comics people called ‘comics tools‘.
Next newsletter out soon.
