121
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!
The only thing I'd add is that federation making it into lemmy's code base did not mean the feature was complete or usable at all. Plus nobody would've wanted to federate with us back then anyhow, since we would've immediately dominated the conversation on any instance, since there were no other large instances around, which was basically the case until this year
Also lots of drama and harassment and people burning out
Edit: oh and actually, it's worth noting, the development effort for re-merging with lemmy wasn't just "migrate our data back to compatibility with lemmy", it was "re-develop from scratch all our custom features and contribute them back to upstream lemmy (if they will take them)"
Hexbear devs (primarily @makotech222) are the reason that Lemmy has Custom Emoji, Taglines, Pinned/Featured posts, and probably a good handful of smaller things I'm forgetting.
Oh yeah. There were a lot of growing pains before the site culture stabilized.