My answer:
When chapotraphouse was banned on reddit many mods and users came together to create a space on a link aggregator platform.
Choosing lemmy the original admin and developer team decided to fork it for various reasons. About a year ago, sustained effort was taken to upstream many of the forked features so that we could rebase with current version lemmy and federate.
Over the years hexbear has become a non-sectarian social media space for sharing news, memes, links, posts and comments with each other as the mods endeavour to make the space welcoming to marginalized people.
Terms of Service | Code of Conduct | Modlog | Allow-list | PPB
Hexbear is a big tent leftist instance that really has one main thing: Don't believe CIA or State Department lies about AES states. You can be an anarchist, you just also have to not believe everything that dribbles out of an anti-communist's mouth.
Also shitposting and irony.