We know how much of a dumpster fire Twitter is, especially when it comes to spoilers. And unfortunately, Hogwarts Legacy fans couldn’t escape them in Mastodon, which led to a server shutting down, and 12,000 accounts urged to migrate.
Mastodon user @nathan announced that Mastodon.lol will be shutting down due to the influx of Hogwarts Legacy spoilers he’s been seeing recently from boycotters and anti-JK Rowling supporters. He’s giving users only three months to sort out their accounts by migrating them to another server. By May 9, the server will be gone.
Nathan tried to tone down the spoilers a few hours before the server shutdown announcement. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough as the server owner was met with bullying. He was constantly called a “transphobe” for supporting the game, with some informing him that some of Rowling’s writings in the book were filled with harmful stereotypes, like her depiction of goblins.
There was some support for Nathan, who supported his opinion about purchasing the game. But it seems the anti-Rowling crowd managed to get to him to the point where shutting down an entire Mastodon server is the only option he has.
Harry Potter spoilers aren’t new. People who managed to get early copies of the books would go to public midnight releases and spoil the story out loud in public or on forum websites. However, the deletion of Mastodon.lol due to Hogwarts Legacy has become an example of how it isn’t a viable replacement for Twitter. While the site has its merits, it just shows that there is obvious user and server instability, especially when the owner decides that they have enough.
Hogwarts Legacy was met with backlash due to its ties to the Wizarding World franchise, an IP owned by JK Rowling. The Harry Potter author has shared harmful opinions about the trans community. It didn’t help that some boycotters noticed that Hogwarts Legacy has some antisemitic undertones and claimed that purchasing the game would harm the trans community. Unfortunately, the boycott didn’t succeed as the game soon became the number one most-played game on Steam.