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The word 'anime' (アニメ) is a Japanese shortening of the English word 'animation' — a gairaigo, or foreign loanword.
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AnimeSphere Guides
Kitsu alternative: keep tracking after maintenance mode
Kitsu has been a beloved tracker for a decade, and its slide into maintenance mode has a lot of fans asking the same question: where do I take my list before it becomes a museum piece? Here is a realistic migration plan, including the parts that are not smooth yet.
What maintenance mode means for your list
Maintenance mode is not a shutdown. The site stays up, but active development stops, bugs accumulate, and new seasons can lag in the database. The practical risk is not that Kitsu disappears tomorrow. It is that your tracking slowly degrades, and if the lights ever do go out, you want your history already living somewhere else.
The rule for any tracker in 2026: only move to a service that lets you export back out. Anything else trades one lock-in for another.
Moving your list to AnimeSphere
AnimeSphere imports two formats today, both at animesphere.app/import:
- MAL XML files. Drop the file and it is parsed in your browser, never uploaded. You see a full preview of your list, counts, mean score, and top genres before you are asked to sign up for anything.
- AniList usernames. Paste your username and your public list is previewed the same way. Statuses, scores, and progress all carry over.
And the export-back promise is real: everything you build here exports as MAL-compatible XML or full JSON, anytime, from Settings. That format re-imports into MyAnimeList, AniList, and Kitsu itself. We call it the AnimeSphere Pledge, and it means leaving us is always as easy as joining.
The honest part: getting your data out of Kitsu
We do not have a one-click Kitsu import yet, and we will not pretend otherwise. Kitsu also has no built-in MAL XML export, so the migration takes one intermediate step. You have three realistic paths:
- If you ever synced or maintained the same list on MyAnimeList, export the XML there and import it here directly. This is the cleanest path.
- Use a community-built Kitsu export tool to convert your Kitsu library into MAL-compatible XML, then import that file. These tools are third party, so preview the result before finishing the import. Our importer shows you exactly what it parsed before anything is saved.
- Rebuild manually. For lists under a hundred entries this is faster than it sounds, and our search and season browsers make re-adding quick.
What you get after the move
Tracking is the start, not the whole product. Your list powers recommendations, season planning, and stats, and AnimeSphere also plays 2,982 free, official, US-playable episodes inline. A few of the biggest free series:
