Lemmy has cool features like inserting pics in post body and being very actively developed. We will get federation, an app and lemmy/hexbear's development would be accelerated because of the combined resources...

Lemmy supports display names which can be used for pronouns until hexbear devs upstream that and it also supports avatars and banners.

I'm aware that hexbear devs wanted to leave Rust behind and this way they can just upstream the features that lemmy doesn't have and leave development to lemmy's devs if they want to.

Getting back to lemmy is a lot of work but will probably be very rewarding in the long run.

I also think it'd also be great for hexbear to have posts from other comms outside of hexbear... we don't want to turn into a small closed community.

  • liberal [none/use name]A
    ·
    3 years ago

    Hey comrade, totally valid question. The Hexbear Manifesto covers the reasoning for shifting from Vanilla Lemmy pretty well. Returning to vanilla lemmy would involve building a completely new site and the loss of all custom developed features like pronouns, sitemods, reports, custom emojis, and more.

    There also isn't an interest from the core dev volunteers in continuing to work with Rust. When we previously did try to contribute upstream, the turnaround times of having our PRs approved + number of rewrites requested unfortunately made keeping up with the vanilla project untenable. That was for totally valid reasons since the core Lemmy team has other priorities, but did result in the code drift that eventually created a de facto fork even with the legacy rust codebase.

    The vanilla lemmy devs are comrades and we 100% support their efforts. This project just has different priorities. A version of the lemmy effort in a different language more folks are familiar with also helps benefit the project since it will eventually allow for more people to contribute to building out a federated ecosystem.

    We're currently focused on the back-end rewrite and will be able to look at federation + other new features following that. For comrades familiar with typescript, please take a look at our getting started guide for how to contribute to Hexbear.

  • SirLotsaLocks [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    From what I understand when the site has more devs available one of the plans down to road is to have federation with lemmy. Like @garbology said having images in the comments and posts is still a thing it's just disabled for security at the moment. Also from what I understand the lemmy devs have a clear vision of what they want to create and are pretty unwavering which isn't a bad thing at all but it doesn't really line up with what the hexbear team needs.

      • garbology [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        There's been several public calls for devs, each time a wave of hopefuls jumps into the matrix dev room.

          • garbology [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Nothing about the way the site works should be incompatible with ActivityPub, although the hexbear API is no longer compatible with lemmy. Someone just needs to code the federation, since I guess it's not portable from lemmy to hexbear anymore.

  • garbology [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Lemmy has cool features like inserting pics in post body

    Hexbear still supports that, but it's been disabled out of an abundance of caution.

    • liberal [none/use name]A
      ·
      3 years ago

      Correct. It allows for someone to self host an image and skim the ip addresses of everyone who views the embedded image.

      This may have changed with the vanilla project since we were beta testing the site before launch, but is why we disable the feature for our site. Only allowing images uploaded to this site is an option, but like with any open source project, requires a volunteer interested in that feature to build it.

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I agree that's an issue, but don't the opengraph post previews allow the same thing? I brought that up a while ago that y'all have been allowing some pretty questionable embeds like vids and pdfs in the previews that do exactly that. Or is there a whitelist or cache on the backend now?

  • Offline [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    ...The race is on to make a chapotrap house lemmy while hexbear messes around with its own thing.