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:

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

    I'm sorry, but English is the primary language of the Internet, so the language argument rings hollow, and the "what if people don't want it" line genuinely is right out of the old struggle session.

    Regardless, I'm not trying to fight them about it or suggest we try to fork the project; we will need to go along with their preferred direction. But I don't have to agree with or like their reasoning.

    Edit: Moreover, have you looked at the user flairs issue? They're essentially dumping a number of difficult choices onto us, and then they can just reject our solution out of hand if they take any issue with it at all. User flairs are apparently going to be a key-value store--but how do they federate? How are they set? Can the user set whatever pronouns (or other flair) they want, or is there some list of choices chosen by admins? What is the default value? (Upstream probably won't like our solution of using "None/Use Name" as the default.) How does that (the set of choices) work with federation? (E.g., do other servers just have to accept whatever another server allows, or do they have to set some kind of whitelist?) How is this displayed? Is it always-on (upstream won't like that, just based on the discussion around user pronouns) or is it something admins have to enable (meaning if we federate with another server, that server can opt not to display our pronouns over there)?

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

      I’m sorry, but English is the primary language of the Internet, so the language argument rings hollow

      Okay this is some chauvinistic bullshit. On the day that Chinese-speakers outnumber English-speakers, I expect you to publish a retraction.

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

        No need to wait that long; you're right. I was frustrated because the languages point feels more like justification than reasoning--gendered pronouns are very much a part of many languages not mentioned, and even in Spanish with pronouns left out, it's totally possible to misgender someone. As I said elsewhere, the response comes off pretty dismissive to me, especially in light of the extensive, carefully-crafted post to which they're responding. So I dismissed that argument out of hand (and in a shitty way), which was unreasonable and, as you say, chauvinistic. I will try to do better in the future.

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

          Yeah, I admit I was iffy on their wording there. Like I could have sworn Spanish had gendered pronouns?

          I can see why they'd want to be language-neutral though. The fediverse seems to be pretty diverse, and inter-accessible.

          Meanwhile I'm over here trying to watch a Chinese tv show, and I'm baffled when I click on a Chinese url and it doesn't work...

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

        Ok, but the actual issue posted on Github says none of that. It's an incredibly bare-bones issue, just the basic idea and nothing more. So as it stands, it's a giant roadblock in our way, and they're basically demanding that we do a whole bunch of extra work to build out a preferred feature of theirs, which they don't appear to have fleshed out much at all, in order for us to get back in sync with upstream. I realize they don't have to care about us, but honestly we are the most active and heavily-used lemmy instance that currently exists, so they probably ought to.

        Also, something about the response comes off as pretty rude to me. TimHexbear posted a comment back in August, no one ever responded to them, and then Nutomic closes the issue yesterday, without saying anything other than another link to the (basically empty, as mentioned above) user flairs issue. That doesn't seem very cordial or polite to me.

        Edit: Sorry if my tone is bad; your points are good and valid and I just need to stop being grumpy about it lol