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What's the deal with Hexbear? - Hexbear
hexbear.netHas anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become?
Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one
long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while
waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or
getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think
everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are
all written by the same people. Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse
observer [https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list] is either straight up wrong or
there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less
than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active
userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance. Seems to
me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like
a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well. So glad this thread could become such a
perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
Seriously, they're doing my bits for me!
I'd just add that the fork began before the site launched, in that month-long exile period on Discord. Recruiting for the project started on day one, and the deadline got pushed further and further back as we realized the scope of the undertaking. At that point, we had about a dozen volunteers from the community hacking on all sorts of random shit.
We added a comment / post reporting system, added a "site mod" permission (at the time, there were only community mods and site admins, and the site admin page exposed very sensitive operational details), tried to limit the number of embeds which could be included in a single comment (then left it at zero forever due to abuse), added a toggle to shut off community creation, added hCaptcha support, among many other changes. Some of these changes landed upstream early on, but even cherry-picking them was a chore. After the site launched, pronoun tags were added, and we ended up completely porting the UI to React.js for some fucking reason lmao.
so when was the actual official hard fork? I've tried looking through old posts but it's hard to tell with all the deleted posts and comments
iirc it was immediate. it wouldn't be in the post history because it predates the site.