Hi folks.

A while back, we announced our intention to move Hexbear back to Lemmy. This post will serve as our first transparency report on our progress.

Whilst it has unfortunately been quite slow, we have a roadmap of features to port over and we're happy to share that the first big feature was merged upstream last week - a massive shout out to @makotech222 , who ported over our modlog filters. PR for those curious here.

Other features merged upstream include comment rate limits and visual improvements to post listings.

In addition to the work already completed, we have spent some time planning and designing other features we plan to port over. This is sometimes more difficult than it sounds; we need to implement them in such a way that upstream can merge them, and this often requires a very different approach to the one implemented in the current Hexbear fork. Example features that we have spent some time planning are pronoun tags and custom emotes.

Finally, we have members on the team who've been figuring out how we'll migrate our database to Lemmy's schema as it has diverged a lot. Special thanks to @Quimby and @footfaults for their work here.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us so please, if you are interested in helping us, reach out to CARCOSA (@carc0sa:chapo.chat on Matrix) or Layla (@layla:chapo.chat on Matrix) to get started. The bigger our team is of people motivated to get this over the line the better!

That's all for today. We hope this was useful and answered some of your questions. If you have more, some of the team will be in the comments for a while so please feel free to ask.

Thanks, and viva la Hexbear!

  • crime [she/her, any]
    hexbear
    31
    2 years ago

    Y'all are doing incredible work, thank you for keeping the lights on and improving things here! :mao-clap:

    FWIW I'd love to get involved with helping out on the ops/infra side of things again in the future — likely won't be able to for awhile with the deluge of exhausting things I've had to deal with in my personal life, but I do plan to re-volunteer when I'm able!

    • layla [she/her]
      hexbear
      19
      2 years ago

      No pressure comrade :) When you're feeling it you know where to reach us. And I'll reach out when we're nearing relaunch so you know what we're planning on the infra side of things

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
        hexbear
        12
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        I FUCKING KNEW THOSE EMOJIS EXISTED GOD DAMNIT.

        The other day I wanted those and I searched every variation of Stalin, disappear, edit, and I scanned the whole list of emojis twice and apparently fucking missed it. PURGE.

        :monke-beepboop:

        • Antiwork [none/use name]
          hexbear
          1
          2 years ago

          Same a while ago. Anything with two emotes usually has a 1 and 2 that’s how I found em.

  • KiaKaha [he/him]
    hexbear
    29
    2 years ago

    I’m really glad to see that progress is being made on this—there’s a world of difference between slow progress and no progress.

    So long as there’s a functional team working on things, it’ll get there in the end.

    Btw, has this been cross-posted to any Lemmy instance yet?

  • AmericaDelendeEst [any]
    hexbear
    20
    2 years ago

    comment rate limits

    No stop I don't like this it's just going to annoy me when I'm drunk and on a severe posting spree and don't have the attention span to wait before my next comment

    • layla [she/her]
      hexbear
      21
      2 years ago

      Hexbear already has comment rate limits! They're not that strict dw

  • thirstywizard [he/him]
    hexbear
    18
    2 years ago

    We have the best emoji collection I've seen on a site in a good 20 years.

    Lemmy definitely could use our presence, with the fediverse growing they've got an infestation of nasty r*ddit libs starting to fester.

    • ella [any]A
      hexbear
      18
      2 years ago

      I'm not actually sure, I'm checking with the person who'd know, I'll let you know when they get back to me

    • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
      hexbear
      16
      2 years ago

      I have no idea about the patreon, but this is linked on the sidebar of the front page of hexbear: https://liberapay.com/hexbear

      • ella [any]A
        hexbear
        19
        2 years ago

        :this:

        The librepay is definitely legit.

        • Mindfury [he/him]
          hexbear
          2
          2 years ago

          yo thanks for confo - I randomly asked in the mega a week or so ago where the liberapay money was going or if it was still legit due to the site staff changes since the start

    • KiaKaha [he/him]
      hexbear
      12
      2 years ago

      It was made right at the beginning—I’ve been donating there, so I’ll be put out if it’s not real lol.

    • CARCOSA [they/them]
      hexagon
      A
      hexbear
      14
      2 years ago

      https://git.chapo.chat/hexbear-collective/lemmy-hexbear/wiki/Security-Statement-AKA-Warrant-Canary

    • layla [she/her]
      hexbear
      12
      2 years ago

      It's hosted on a VPS, somewhere in Europe I'm not sure where

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
        hexbear
        9
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        We were brought offline when this happened. :macron:

        We were left scratching out heads for a couple hours, wondering if our server ended up in the back of a van until the news came out. Luckily, we did not suffer any data loss. I haven't been privy to the ops stuff since then though.

  • footfaults [none/use name]
    hexbear
    14
    2 years ago

    We also had to spend some time fixing up the Docker infrastructure so that it was possible to build a local instance of Hexbear, in order to be able to develop and test locally. This will be important for testing migration from the hexbear fork back to upstream.

  • x8vmte4nhf7joq7p [any]
    hexbear
    8
    2 years ago

    I wish I were a more competent dev so I could help out...maybe someday. Thank you all for your hard work in keeping the site running and looking to the future!

    • KiaKaha [he/him]
      hexbear
      8
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      The best way to become a competent dev is to do work as an incompetent dev :think-about-it:

      • x8vmte4nhf7joq7p [any]
        hexbear
        4
        2 years ago

        True, but I'd rather that incompetence end up in something relatively useless than in critical posting infrastructure! The only task I feel fairly confident in is writing web scrapers, and that's cause the work is 99% tedious HTML parsing instead of anything that requires skill.

        Seriously though, I ought to find some noob-friendly open source projects to contribute code to. I've contributed bug reports where I dig into the code and propose solutions but I've been too intimidated to actually do a pull request for anything more than a one-line bugfix. It's a combination of feeling overwhelmed/intimidated by larger codebases, not wanting to be judged for shitty code, and the irrational fear that I will write code so bad it will kneecap a project (while somehow also passing code review).

        • KiaKaha [he/him]
          hexbear
          8
          2 years ago

          Have you had a chance to look at the Hexbear/Lemmy codebases to see if they’re noob friendly enough?

          It could be an interesting learning experience, especially since the project at present is porting stuff from a fork (Hexbear) back to the root project. You’d get a chance to see how two different, but similar, codebases achieve the same goal.

          It’s also easiest to get motivation to contribute when it’s a project you care about.