Diagon Lemmy - A Harry Potter-themed Lemmy Server is now live (before you block me instantly, please hear me out)

blue@diagonlemmy@diagonlemmy.social to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 135 points –
  1. Harry Potter Fandoms will be a part of the Fediverse one way or the other. It’s better to shape this development rather than being overwhelmed by it.
  2. Harry Potter Fandoms are a huge opportunity for the Fediverse. Look at what the collaboration of Lego and Disney brought to Fortnite. People want to spend time in places, in which they feel familiar and welcomed. I'm not saying collaborating with big companies here, what I'm saying is: the Fediverse needs to be filled with life and we have to use that opportunity first, before others do.
  3. Don't throw the opinions of J.K. Rowling and its fandom in one bucket. It’s one of the biggest in the world, there is a broad range of opinions and people.
  4. The Fediverse needs more projects that immediately make sense to people. Projects that you tell a person about, and they say: "Oh, yeah, that makes sense." Mastodon in comparison to Twitter was such a thing: its billionaire proof. Everybody gets why that's a good thing. A better, more open place to build Harry Potter fan sites could be another.
  5. The project (including other places like this that may follow) could also become another attractive place on the Fediverse for the open-source community. Who wouldn’t be excited to help build the world of Harry Potter?

All of this is of course up for discussion. I'm a very stubborn person but I'm also able to listen ;)

Edit: I removed "queer friendly" from the description. Its not a claim that I can fully uphold anyways. Instead, it has a no tolerancy policy against transphobia, which is more clear and probably easier to enforce.

Here is the link: https://diagonlemmy.social

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I love to be able to reclaim works from their hateful authors, especially cultural ones. I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, and that dude was hateful. He makes JK Rowling look sweet and kindly. But it’s a lot easier to reclaim the narrative and make it a part of our culture when the author is literally dead.

Agreed. The athmosphere he creates is great but that dude was really problematic.

I understand that HP is important to a lot of people. It was a cultural phenomenon. But we aren’t leaving it behind just because JK Rowling said something offensive. We’re leaving it behind because the author is actively using our consumption to fund hate and campaigning to deny rights to trans people.

Sure, we find ourselves in a pickle, there. On the one hand, she is actively harming people and this will stay this way until it eventually becomes part of the public domain.

However, boycotting Harry Potter also comes as a price that, at least I would argue, also hurts minorities. Because the places create structure, which protects vulnarable people.

Why don't we replace it with something else that does the same? Well, because in my opinion, Harry Potter culturally serves as a mythologization of the digital. People use it to understand the digital world. In past centuries, humans always made up stories and myths to understand complex concepts. The same thing is happening with the digital world and Harry Potter is one of the first to do this. It has a unique and central societal purpose.

That doesn't mean that it can be improved, as can be seen in Hogwarts Legacy, which is kind of progressive, and also still slightly antisemetic, which is not so great, BUT I think overall the books still do much more good for vulnarable people than anything Rowling does against them, if she wants it or not.

So at the end of my line of thought, I always end up with two options: either create something new that does the same thing as H.P. while being more progressive but still hugely popular (which is hard to impossible), or to use H.P. and build on top of it to make it more modern (which is much easier).

What I would like to see more in these discussion is the question how EFFECTIVE Rowlings actions really are and if boycotting doesn't hurt more than it helps.

Harry Potter spaces are not unique in creating structure. There are tons of fandoms, with millions of members. It's not the first modern fandom by any means either. It's not like if HP suddenly disappeared there wouldn't be any fandoms of equivalent or larger size to provide "structure" to vulnerable people. Lots of them have more queer people in them too, and less transphobia.

I'm not sure what makes Harry Potter uniquely digital in your mind either. I'm sure you can interpret it as being about that, but I don't think that's the interpretation most people walk away with. Even if it really is a lens some people use to understand the Internet or whatnot, I certainly don't think it's the first story to be used in that way... There are a lot of stories that can claim that title that far predate Harry Potter, many of which have fandoms of their own.

I just don't think HP is an essential backbone of culture. It's important to a lot of people, for sure. And I can't imagine what it's like to realize that the creator of a work that's so important to you is a terrible person. That has got to be a really shitty situation to be in. But there are other fandoms out there. There's other great fiction, written by authors who won't weaponize your consumption against minorities. It's not a dichotomy of either you embrace Harry Potter or you must write your own.

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