Hi everyone.

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

We're happy to share two more features have been successfully ported upstream, with a third very close to completion:

  1. Featuring posts site-wide
  2. Site-wide taglines
  3. [WIP] Custom emojis

Last time, I mentioned we had some work to do porting Hexbear's database schema back to Lemmy's. I'm very happy to announce that, as of three hours ago, we successfully ported a recent database backup from Hexbear to Lemmy's schema for the first time. We have used this to start up a local Lemmy instance running with the past two and a half years of of Hexbear data on it. Here's a sneak peak!

None of this would have been possible without the volunteer developers. In particular, I want to again give a massive shout out to @makotech222 - he has been doing the bulk of this work and we cannot thank him enough. :stalin-heart:

Progress continues to be made, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us. Whilst we are at the stage where our core features have been ported over, there are some features we'd lose. For example, upstream are not interested in explicit pronoun support. We have a workaround for this which allows for pronouns to be set and displayed as is shown in the screenshot above, however, with more volunteers we could work on a better solution that upstream are interested in: user flairs. So please, if you are a developer who wants to help port over the last couple features upstream, reach out to either me, CARCOSA, or layla.

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! :hexbear-static-logo:

  • booty [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    gendered pronouns are too specific to the English language to be added as an explicit feature in Lemmy

    just make it so that if someone doesnt select pronouns then the box isn't displayed

    some people may not be comfortable giving out their gender on a public forum

    see above

    they want to implement user flairs as an alternative as it is a solution that has more uses than just pronouns

    they could do that and also pronouns

    I remain feeling that this is a sus response

    • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Dessalines is a comrade and extremely based.

      they could do that and also pronouns

      Pronouns will likely be implemented as user flairs, so a separate implementation is redundant the moment user flairs roll out.

      Given federation requires Lemmy to maintain compatibility between tons of configurations, forks, & versions, I see a number of reasons why implementing pronouns as user flair is a better architectural decision:

      • Avoids technical debt of adding another element to the API.
      • Avoids future version/instance incompatibilities from changes to the API.
      • Avoids maintaining localization code that must handle boatloads of edge cases for pronoun quirks in various languages.
      • Avoids instances removing pronouns from content on federated instances if the instance disables pronouns on their server. Pronouns as flare prevents removing them without also removing flair entirely...which will prevent a lot of misgendering.
      • Avoids spending dev time debating a one-size-fits-all implementation that works for all languages & satisfies most instances.
      • Allows instances to set defaults for provided pronoun options & their grouping, sorting, labeling, & display.
      • Allows even more granularity if individual comms can override & extend instance default flair/behavior.
      • Allows sharing code with other types of flare.
      • Allows features added for user flare to automatically apply to pronouns (e.g. flare colors/icons/abbreviations/expansions, flare-based comment filtering & restricting comments on post to users with specific flare)

      Thesis: Pronouns via flare would provide a better experience and be easier to maintain than as a standalone implementation.

      • boboblaw [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Rebuttal: flair*

        But seriously, this sounds like the best way to do it. Hexbear's solution is totally ad hoc. I hadn't thought of the case of federated instances disabling flairs and that sounds like an added bonus.

    • wopazoo [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      read their actual response instead of my summary

      • booty [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        you included their actual response in the comment, which i read. the summary accurately summarized their response, which is still sus.

        • wopazoo [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          both lead devs are communists which makes me inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt