Welcome to a new era! Hexbear.net is changing the way leftists communicate and organize online. It offers a collectively-funded alternative to corporate social media platforms which cater to only their advertisers. Everyday our platform is removing Beariers and building solidarity.

Hexbear’s vision is to become a universally recognized independent platform synonymous with leftism, socialism, and activism. Somewhere both shitposter and organizer can exist in solidarity. Since launching last July, we’ve expanded rapidly with more than 14,000 accounts, over 90,000 posts and 1 million+ comments.

“ChapoChat'' was always intended as a temporary name. When first building the site, we needed something to rally around and had to move fast. Until now, ChapoChat has been focusing on the practical of “what” the project did, but the “why” also needs to be part of the story and give reasons for our comrades to believe in it. We’ve outgrown the “ChapoChat” name and are at a new stage.

Why Hexbear of all names? As socialists, we believe the folks doing the work should have ownership over the direction of their work. After many conversations with our dev, sitemod, and admin teams, “hexbear.net” was decided on as the new name for the platform. We’ve been heading in this direction for a while, our codebase even has the name already!

Hexbear as a name is easy to remember, tendency-neutral, and inviting. We want to continue rebuilding that “lib to left” pipeline that we had going previously. We also want the platform and software to be useful for our comrades who are organizing and fighting the good fight. The “.net” domain is an intentional throwback to when the internet was decentralized, independent, and weird.

Being strictly associated with the Chapo Trap House name has actively blocked us from being an option for a number of organizers as the pod is increasingly viewed by other leftists as more associated with stupidpol and SocDem politics than other more leftist causes.

This site and its community has grown into something far more dynamic than just the fans of a SocDem political podcast. We have comrades from every tendency and continent talking together, finding solibearity, and yes sometimes fighting to the death.

We’ve used the analogy before of this site as the digital reincarnation of an old-school Union Hall, and we think that continues to hold true. Some of the folks here will be shitposting, some will be actively organizing, and both are cool and very fucking good.

When TransComrade69 formally announced the new name last week to the world via a featured post, the reaction was pretty amazing. We expected the Chapo community to be as split as always. After all, every project needs the good, the bad, and the liberal to cast their eyes on it and express a personal opinion.

Bearing this in mind, we’re excited to announce another opportunity for the Hexbear community to participate in electoralism and vooting. Lady Hexbear is fierce, she is powerful, she is relentless, and it is time she had a proper name. We’ve made a dedicated post where Chapos can submit and upbear potential names. The top 7 names from this ursine primary will make it into a final voting round (along with a few dev favorites!).

Renaming as Hexbear.net allows our project and its community to better build out the lib-to-left pipeline and welcome other leftist groups onto the platform. Regardless, we can obviously still refer to ourselves as Chapos.

While folks always have the option of spinning up their own Hexbear instance, a huge amount of work and labor goes into maintaining and hosting a site. As socialists, we understand that together we are stronger than when we are separated. With that said, federation continues to be on our dev roadmap and is something we’ll be looking at once we finish chipping away at our backend rewrite.

We hope this lays out the team’s goals and aspirations for the site. On this blessed day, we all continue to be Chapos, and our promised land is Hexbear.net. Let’s do cool shit and build the left. Viva la Hexbear!

Signed by the following comrades: @DashEightMate@hexbear.net , @TransComrade69@hexbear.net , @AlfredNobel@hexbear.net , @ScreamoBMO@hexbear.net ,@Uncle_Hoe@hexbear.net , @Cuttlefish@hexbear.net , @chamomile@hexbear.net , @WhyEssEff@hexbear.net , @alltheseteeth@hexbear.net , @itsPina@hexbear.net, @quartz242 .

edit: to anyone else on the team who would like to have their signature added, please post in either the dev or mod channels! Thanks!

    • Sandals2 [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah I just had to create a new account. Sandals is dead, Long live Sandals2

      • HexbearPR [none/use name]
        hexagon
        M
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Sorry to hear that! Did you not have an email set for the account? Either way, we strongly recommend rotating accounts after a certain period of time. Doxing sucks!

        • Sandals2 [comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Yeah no offense to you folks but I'm not gonna put an email down for the Feds to possibly collect later.

          • HexbearPR [none/use name]
            hexagon
            M
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            Totally get that, never use an email attached to your identity! We strongly recommend using a provider like protonmail for any site that's remotely political.

            There's been some discussion around only allowing emails attached to that and other privacy-focused providers, but we ultimately want to leave that choice to our userbase.

            To be clear, we take security extremely seriously, but you have to always design assuming you'll eventually be compromised. The NSA sure does have a lot of money from the spoils of the American Empire's exploitation of the global south!

              • HexbearPR [none/use name]
                hexagon
                M
                ·
                4 years ago

                Exactly! Protonmail with an address name not attached to any others you currently have! There are a lot of great random username generators out there.

        • protochud [comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          wait, is that really the recommendation? how do we build up an identity if that's the case?

            • SirLotsaLocks [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I somewhat built an identity with opsec not being a concern for a while and I regret a lot and did a lot of deleting to clean things up. I think as long as opsec is an important thing starting out you can do it pretty well.

            • protochud [comrade/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              hmm, i think there is value in holding an identity. would it be possible to set up a comm where we could do doxx audits on each other? would also be helpful in learning how to keep clean accounts elsewhere

              • HexbearPR [none/use name]
                hexagon
                M
                ·
                4 years ago

                We recommend only doing dox audits with comrades your trust over encrypted communication channels like matrix. You never know how exposed you are until someone digs!

                • protochud [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  valid. if that's the case, what about periodically deleting your account data? is a "purge all" feature on the roadmap?

          • HexbearPR [none/use name]
            hexagon
            M
            ·
            4 years ago

            It's definitely a balance! After recent events, we're looking at how we can better protect OpSec organically (eg in the site's UX) along with encouraging best practices!

    • HexbearPR [none/use name]
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      4 years ago

      Remember to manually update the site URL in your password manager! For those who didn't store or memorize their passwords, we apologize and also encourage you to view this as an unintentional "opsec reset"! Doxing sucks!