I think this is a good idea and wish you all the best.
Moderation will be key of course, but the rules ( http://diagonlemmy.social/post/108 ) sound good.
At the same time, if somebody doesn’t even want to think about HP, they can easily block the entire instance, no harm no foul.
I really like the app for my personal reading tracking. Been using it for a couple years, and this year (?) there was a huge update that improved it a lot (better UX/UI and statistics if I’m not mistaken).
It’s mostly an app that does what it should, but not more, and gets out the way, which is awesome.
I’m actually not that into actual self-hosting (it feels too close to my day job). But i love the idea of it, and actually do host my own RSS Reader: It’s selfoss (PHP + SQLite, so, very simple) and i have been using ever since google reader shut down. It runs on my uberspace.de instance.
This sounds pretty awesome tbh. Will check out the two books mentioned.