1y ago

Why isn't there a Harry Potter-themed Lemmy instance yet?

It's one of the first things I would expect from a site like this. I know that J.K. Rowlings views are very controversial to put it mildly, but:

The fandom/books are not the author
Harry Potter will become a part of the Fediverse at some point anyways - better to support it early on and shape its developing rather than having a company build a H.P. social network on top of the fediverse, which will be to our disadvantage
In terms of potential users, this could be huge for the threadiverse
We are in the Fediverse: defederation is always a possibility

Or was it just never tried before / no one wanted to yet?

40 comments

fuck J.K. Rowling and anything to do with her.
you want a Harry Potter themed instance? fucking make one.
- I've obviously missed something here, but why the hatred towards Rowling?

There is !harrypotter@literature.cafe if you want to join. There is some activity at the moment, but not enough to go for a dedicated instance.
Also, as the other comments have shown, the bigotry of the author does not help.

Most of the people on the fediverse are adults who are most likely going to join either a general instance or a themed instance for interests for adults and not for a children’s book series, especially not one with a TERFy author
People like SpongeBob, I don’t think there is interest for a SpongeBob instance. Nevertheless if you think there is interest in it, feel free to host your own.

The issue at hand is you fail to separate the fandom from the economic benefit driven to the author.
It's like buying Nestle because you enjoy the chocolate, despite the fact that there are respectable companies that aren't absolute monsters that also make chocolate you could be enjoying.
JKR is as much HP as Mark Schneide is Nestle. End of story. If you don't support her views, find one of the millions of other wonderful works of literature to be a fan of.

It's very obvious that the kind of people that hang around in fediverse absolutely despise Rowling. I never see any positive discourse about Harry Potter here. Even discussions about the game are generally negative.

There was one, but as you can see, there isn't much of an interest in the works of bigots
- Really? A whole instance?
  
  I mean, it was just a lemmy instance someone put up. It's not that huge a thing, and it wasn't very popular...

"separate creator from the art" only works when the creator has passed and no longer benefits from celebrating the art. Arguably not even then.
- Yo-ho yo-ho, they don't benefit from me.

Perhaps because there aren't actually that many dedicated Harry Potter fans on the site? It is quite small, and a bit niche as it is now.
Create one yourself. Nothing is stopping you.

Why does it have to be a whole instance? Why not just create a community for it and start posting content you find interesting?
- There are legitimate reasons for creating an entire instance for a specific fandom. Independence from other instances and their federation decisions is a big one.
  
  Sure, but it seems like that the "need" for independence would come only after the community is already established and some type of conflict came up that made it impossible for them to stay in any of the other already-existing instances.
  To put in concrete terms: I wouldn't have any problem to create a HP community on a topic-specific instance like https://metacritics.zone. @blue_berry@lemmy.world, would you be interested in that? I can make you mod if you want.

Well, even if you ignore the author, the books are actually trash once you're older than ~16 years (give or take a year or two). There are soooo many inconsistencies, that I could write like one full A4 page just from the top of my head (and I read it in 2007, so you bet I've forgotten most of it). I could write many more pages with some light Googling.

40 comments