As some of you may know, Hexbear development has been mostly inactive for a few months now. While the site could survive in this state indefinitely, there is nobody to fix bugs, and we are missing out on over a year of progress made on upstream Lemmy. Example features upstream have since implemented:

  • User blocking
  • Avatar/banners for users and communities
  • Federation

There are many, many others, and the list continues to grow. Going back to Lemmy would also mean the ability to use Hexbear through mobile apps.

It is unclear if some of our features, such as our emotes and our featured threads, can be merged upstream. Thus, the proposal is to fork Lemmy again, this time deliberately not diverging too far from upstream so it's easier to maintain the patches and apply them on top of each new Lemmy release.

This is a large undertaking. There is no timeline, but we expect it to be a while before the site is migrated over to the finished fork.

We're still in the early stages, but the more people involved the sooner we can progress. Primarily, we need developers (Rust & TypeScript) and ops/infrastructure people. Please reach out to me via Matrix if you're interested in helping out. If you need help setting it up, let us know. Thanks all.

  • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Because mobile was mentioned, I'll just say that the mobile experience for me at least is actually pretty solid. I just dragged the site's browser icon to my app screen and can access the site with one button press and the usability is on par with desktop.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Same here, but since the newest iOS update it’s been super super buggy. Dropdown menus don’t work, sometimes I can’t comment, sometimes I can’t upvote, and sometimes it just crashes when I open it.

      • JoesFrackinJack [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        ooof that doesn't sound good. I'm on android and don't seem to have that issue, hopefully that one is easily resolved

        • viva_la_juche [they/them, any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I have an android tablet and an iphone and the experience on android has pretty much always been better than iOS for me. Sometimes on my phone the site hangs up for awhile before loading