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: