As some of you may know, Hexbear development has been mostly inactive for a few months now. While the site could survive in this state indefinitely, there is nobody to fix bugs, and we are missing out on over a year of progress made on upstream Lemmy. Example features upstream have since implemented:

  • User blocking
  • Avatar/banners for users and communities
  • Federation

There are many, many others, and the list continues to grow. Going back to Lemmy would also mean the ability to use Hexbear through mobile apps.

It is unclear if some of our features, such as our emotes and our featured threads, can be merged upstream. Thus, the proposal is to fork Lemmy again, this time deliberately not diverging too far from upstream so it's easier to maintain the patches and apply them on top of each new Lemmy release.

This is a large undertaking. There is no timeline, but we expect it to be a while before the site is migrated over to the finished fork.

We're still in the early stages, but the more people involved the sooner we can progress. Primarily, we need developers (Rust & TypeScript) and ops/infrastructure people. Please reach out to me via Matrix if you're interested in helping out. If you need help setting it up, let us know. Thanks all.

  • Awoo [she/her]27•2 years ago

    This is a good move, I have questions though. Have the scale issues been solved? Our divergence primarily began because Hexbear had an urgent need to solve scale issues that Lemmy had not encountered yet because it didn't have to cater to anything of our size.

    Does this mean we'll get all the customisation features? And does it mean we'll get embedded images? Unique community identity is a valuable feature and has been missing on Hexbear for a long time, it's responsible for the community being unable to get away from everyone treating every comm like it's all the same place. With unique community identity via banners and visible customisation then individual comms will be able to have slightly different identities with different rules and expectations for behaviour. It opens a lot of doors.

    • ella [any]MA27•2 years ago

      Have the scale issues been solved?

      Upstream have implemented their own optimizations since we forked, but it's unclear how they compare to ours and if scale issues are solved.

      Does this mean we’ll get all the customisation features?

      Not sure what you mean, do you mean user avatars etc? Because if so, yes.

      And does it mean we’ll get embedded images?

      (Tentative) Yes. I don't want to commit to anything, we still have a lot of work to do and this may change.

      Agreed on the community customization part. It's one of the more exciting features implemented upstream.

      • Awoo [she/her]25•2 years ago

        Agreed on the community customization part. It’s one of the more exciting features implemented upstream.

        It would make lifeboat communities significantly better for the people that Hexbear absorbs from other platforms. Hexbear users will actually start to treat them like their own separate entities.

        • Awoo [she/her]18•2 years ago

          their users make waaayyyyyyy more frequent posts (though not nearly the same number of comments, they seem to enjoy linkspam for some reason)

          I have suspected for some time that some of it is bot curation. It's something I considered advocating for here, but never got around to. It's something reddit also did when it was younger, and I suspect still does with communities they want to help out. Reddit admins have been quite open about how they used sockpuppets and bots to seed the community with content in their earlier years, I suspect it still goes on.

            • Awoo [she/her]16•2 years ago

              There's definitely two sides to it, the question is what generates the most growth. I suspect it would be valuable for the hobby communities on the site because curating things like latest major news makes those communities more useful faster than other places.

              Usefulness is what generates repeated re-use. If the site is made useful to others more so than elsewhere, they will find themselves using it because it is simply better for the things they want it for. Anime, games and movies for example. Find the right way to curate content for these automatically to make them useful but not full of rubbish and it will add a reason to use the site to the list of reasons people might have. Do this for enough things and eventually you create a daily user. It's about adding value.

        • elDuderino [he/him]8•2 years ago

          I'd post, but I'm an idiot and someone will probably call me a :LIB: and I'm a fragile little boy.