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
    ·
    4 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.