Hi folks.

A while back, we announced our intention to move Hexbear back to Lemmy. This post will serve as our first transparency report on our progress.

Whilst it has unfortunately been quite slow, we have a roadmap of features to port over and we're happy to share that the first big feature was merged upstream last week - a massive shout out to @makotech222 , who ported over our modlog filters. PR for those curious here.

Other features merged upstream include comment rate limits and visual improvements to post listings.

In addition to the work already completed, we have spent some time planning and designing other features we plan to port over. This is sometimes more difficult than it sounds; we need to implement them in such a way that upstream can merge them, and this often requires a very different approach to the one implemented in the current Hexbear fork. Example features that we have spent some time planning are pronoun tags and custom emotes.

Finally, we have members on the team who've been figuring out how we'll migrate our database to Lemmy's schema as it has diverged a lot. Special thanks to @Quimby and @footfaults for their work here.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us so please, if you are interested in helping us, reach out to CARCOSA (@carc0sa:chapo.chat on Matrix) or Layla (@layla:chapo.chat on Matrix) to get started. The bigger our team is of people motivated to get this over the line the better!

That's all for today. We hope this was useful and answered some of your questions. If you have more, some of the team will be in the comments for a while so please feel free to ask.

Thanks, and viva la Hexbear!

  • KiaKaha [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The best way to become a competent dev is to do work as an incompetent dev :think-about-it:

    • x8vmte4nhf7joq7p [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      True, but I'd rather that incompetence end up in something relatively useless than in critical posting infrastructure! The only task I feel fairly confident in is writing web scrapers, and that's cause the work is 99% tedious HTML parsing instead of anything that requires skill.

      Seriously though, I ought to find some noob-friendly open source projects to contribute code to. I've contributed bug reports where I dig into the code and propose solutions but I've been too intimidated to actually do a pull request for anything more than a one-line bugfix. It's a combination of feeling overwhelmed/intimidated by larger codebases, not wanting to be judged for shitty code, and the irrational fear that I will write code so bad it will kneecap a project (while somehow also passing code review).

      • KiaKaha [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Have you had a chance to look at the Hexbear/Lemmy codebases to see if they’re noob friendly enough?

        It could be an interesting learning experience, especially since the project at present is porting stuff from a fork (Hexbear) back to the root project. You’d get a chance to see how two different, but similar, codebases achieve the same goal.

        It’s also easiest to get motivation to contribute when it’s a project you care about.