Disclaimer: I wrote this in like 2 hours at like 11 o'clock at night :P
So I might share later about what it's like learning to foster community, but for now I just want to share about the community in our discord server themselves. The server is called Long Dream Support Group. You can visit our website at nylium.network. For posterity's sake: The words "minecraftfolk" and "minefolk" were coined in that server on February 17, 2024 (although if someone claims to have used them independently beforehand I wouldn't be surprised).
Minecraftfolk, or minefolk, put simply, are any alterhumans whose alterhumanity is influenced by Minecraft. On the one talon, the community is like the next fictive/fictionkin source community. On the other, it's more of a philosophy. The word is intentionally a comparison to the word fictionfolk, with all the broadness and looseness and welcoming that implies.
I've noticed that we tend to play fast and loose with the borders between fiction identity and fact identity, and have a lot of... faitfolk, I guess is the word. It makes a lot of sense to me: a lot of our sources are improv stories where the actors play themselves. These performers often swap fluidly between playing a role and just being themselves playing Minecraft. @revolupine is a good example of this; bark can elaborate if bark wishes.
I find we are also a group rather susceptible to "fanon" or ideas that are popular in a fandom but aren't specifically canon. With Minecraft having very little in the way of canon itself (by design!), it makes sense again that we would pull so much of our understandings of ourselves from the community rather than just the base source. A particular identity that comes to mind is enderhood (that's what I call it—the state of being an enderman). I don't myself, but other enderman I have met often have tails, which is a way endermen are commonly portrayed in fanart even though they/we don't have that in the vanilla game.
The breadth of Minecraft stories and interpretations of them also makes the ides of canonmates frankly laughable here, in my personal opinion. It's not that you'll never find anyone else from the same story, but that even the original fictional characters of Mumbo Jumbo and of Rendog from Hermitcraft Season 8, just for one example, aren't necessarily from the same canon. (This example would take a while to explain, just trust, okay?)
One of my favorite kinds of questions we end up having to answer for ourselves are those of cosmology. What is a Minecraft world? Where do they come from? Why do players respawn but other mobs don't? What is an admin and what do they do? These are common questions that are often explored not only by minecraftfolk, but by Minecraft fans of all stripes. In our server alone, there are wildly varying answers to them.
With this whole open-source, folkloric approach I see, what we end up with is a fictionfolk source community where our shared experiences aren't really in memories or anything like that, but in something that might best compare to a hearthome. I think that blank canvas experience of Minecraft compared with the experience complete stories is a strong influence on its fandom and especially on its fictionfolk.
