What's the deal with Hexbear? - Hexbear
hexbear.net
Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people. Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer [https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list] is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance. Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well. So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.

Seriously, they're doing my bits for me!

  • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    Pretty much, the exact timeline is:

    2019: Dessalines (and maybe Nutmoic? Not sure when he joined) start making lemmy

    June 2020: R/CTH banned

    June 2020: they scramble onto lifeboat discord

    July 2020: devs make chapo.chat using the lemmy code as an actual replacement for r/cth, at this point federation is not a thing in lemmy yet

    ~August-November2020: the chapo.chat devs officially fork the code (to add things like emotes, improve performance for their much larger site than lemmy.ml at the time, etc.)

    ~November 2020: lemmy main code now has federation, chapo.chat’s code is too far removed to remerge, can’t use the federation code

    March 2021: chapo.chat renamed into hexbear.net

    December 2021: it’s announced that the devs cannot maintain the current fork, and they need to get back upstream to the rest of lemmy code

    June 2023: Hexbear gets back close to the rest of lemmy code, still maintains a slight fork, especially for the UI

    August 2023: the Hexbears are unleashed

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]M
      ·
      1 year ago

      order-of-lenin

      I'd just add that the fork began before the site launched, in that month-long exile period on Discord. Recruiting for the project started on day one, and the deadline got pushed further and further back as we realized the scope of the undertaking. At that point, we had about a dozen volunteers from the community hacking on all sorts of random shit.

      We added a comment / post reporting system, added a "site mod" permission (at the time, there were only community mods and site admins, and the site admin page exposed very sensitive operational details), tried to limit the number of embeds which could be included in a single comment (then left it at zero forever due to abuse), added a toggle to shut off community creation, added hCaptcha support, among many other changes. Some of these changes landed upstream early on, but even cherry-picking them was a chore. After the site launched, pronoun tags were added, and we ended up completely porting the UI to React.js for some fucking reason lmao.

      • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        1 year ago

        so when was the actual official hard fork? I've tried looking through old posts but it's hard to tell with all the deleted posts and comments

        • silent_water [she/her]
          ·
          1 year ago

          iirc it was immediate. it wouldn't be in the post history because it predates the site.

    • Freeanotherday [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      June 2023: Hexbear gets back close to the rest of lemmy code, still maintains a slight fork, especially for the UI

      The only reason for this is one of the nerds moved the banner 2 px to the right and the entire community went walter-breakdown mode.

      • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        pronouns too actually lol

        Upstream lemmy doesn't want them because it's too english-specific and they desperately want lemmy to be general purpose software that can be used by anyone in any language so pronouns are a no-go. It's mostly admirable but sometimes they miss IMO. They want a general purpose flair system and are amenable to having pronouns be configurable as a mandatory flair, but that's a lot of development effort so it hasn't happened for like 2 years running

    • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      The only thing I'd add is that federation making it into lemmy's code base did not mean the feature was complete or usable at all. Plus nobody would've wanted to federate with us back then anyhow, since we would've immediately dominated the conversation on any instance, since there were no other large instances around, which was basically the case until this year

      Also lots of drama and harassment and people burning out

      Edit: oh and actually, it's worth noting, the development effort for re-merging with lemmy wasn't just "migrate our data back to compatibility with lemmy", it was "re-develop from scratch all our custom features and contribute them back to upstream lemmy (if they will take them)"

      Hexbear devs (primarily @makotech222) are the reason that Lemmy has Custom Emoji, Taglines, Pinned/Featured posts, and probably a good handful of smaller things I'm forgetting.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Oh yeah. There were a lot of growing pains before the site culture stabilized.

    • KillSlaveOwners [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Not that it matters but we were briefly a community of lemmy.ml (dev.lemmy.ml at the time) I between the discord and chapo.chat.