I’m not really a “I want to live in Japan” person but these events do make me jealous from time to time. As well as prices of stuff in Japan compared to importing them.

I just checked the post again and I can’t see anything about merch. Maybe they will announce something in the future or they only sell stuff on location.

I don’t like Twitter either but all Japanese anime and manga things are on there so it is the best feed there is to keep up with things (like this event).

As to why I post the original link, it has some good reasons. In the past I used to post Invidious links instead of Youtube links. Just like you just did here. But the thing is these individual font ends often go down temporarily (or worse). Then your link is dead. These front ends usually have the ability to copy the original link into them and then they open it. So I just post the original for everything (yt, twitter, reddit) and then people can paste that into whatever frontend they like or is operational at that moment.

Note that these frontends still need the original site so function… They are mostly for end user privacy, not really effectively boycotting the original site anymore than using an ad blocker.

Additionally not everyone knows about these frontends and linking to some other url for official announcements might not look like legit news to some. It is also just good practice to link to original first hand sources. Even if you don’t like the source, you are still getting it from that source. If you really dislike the source enough, you should just not get any info from that source. But if you do, the source is still the source.