Hexbear is an instance formed mostly by former r/chapotraphouse users after that sub was banned from Reddit a few years ago. Hexbear used to run on a custom fork of Lemmy so that the community could add extra features that they wanted (like custom emoji) but it was recently ported back to mainline Lemmy after merging or reimplementing as many changes as possible.
Currently, Hexbear does not have federation enabled, and there is discussion about who to federate with or even whether to federate at all. The community is very active and self-sufficient and some members prefer the isolation.
Content-wise, it’s a leftist-focused instance. Some shitposts, some serious posts, and a lot of inside jokes.
r/cth was originally a subreddit for the podcast Chapo Trap House, but it eventually bloomed into a general-purpose leftist space. IIRC, the sub was around 160k members at its peak and had a distinct posting culture.
It was quarantined by Reddit for violent speech after calling for the death of slave owners and later banned for no particular reason at the same time as r/the_donald, presumably as a “both sides” sort of thing.
True that. I ended up here by seraching for explanation what hexbear is, since I ened up there and after half and hour I still didn’t know what I was reading.
Someone explained it really, really well on Reddit some years ago:
Hexbear.net started out as chapo.chat - a replacement for the defunct r/ChapoTrapHouse community after it was banned from Reddit. It launched one year ago today, based on a modified version of the Lemmy source code. At the time, Lemmy itself was only around a year old, and in an alpha state. Since r/ChapoTrapHouse had accumulated a long list of enemies in its time, a dozen or so members of the community did about a month-long sprint hardening Lemmy and adding features that reflected the needs of the community.
The developers of Lemmy maintained a pretty low-profile community, while the Chapo refugees were the exact opposite of low-profile, so the communities had divergent priorities. It wouldn’t be fair to demand the Lemmy developers drop everything they were doing to satisfy the Chapo refugee’s needs, but the needs of the Chapo community still had to be met for the project to be successful.
The process was very chaotic, and as a result, the fork of Lemmy used for Hexbear.net will likely never be capable of federating with the wider network of Lemmy instances. A handful of changes were contributed upstream, but many of them likely will never be accepted. None the less, it still abides by the AGPL license and the code is publicly available on git.chapo.chat.
The relationship between Hexbear.net and Lemmy is basically that the Chapo refugees decided Lemmy was the most viable platform to work with, and the Lemmy developers were completely blindsided. The Chapo git repository recorded about 2000 changes within the span of a month and not all of the changes were ideal or appropriate to adopt upstream. Within a week or two of launching, chapo.chat had more users than the flagship Lemmy instance. This was also before federation was officially supported upstream, even though that was always the goal of the project. Had the timing worked out differently, Hexbear might have been federated before adding additional features for their instance, but that’s not how things turned out.
undefined> The process was very chaotic, and as a result, the fork of Lemmy used for Hexbear.net will likely never be capable of federating with the wider network of Lemmy instances
actually hexbear is currently on Lemmy v0.17.0, when they update to version 0.18.0 they will be able to federate
they are gonna do a whitelist intead of a blocklist like other instances, they will probably federate with lemmygrad and lemmy since they have good relations with the modteam of both, any other is a bit of a hard tell
It’s an ongoing debate, but it true Communist/Socialist style there is nobody out there that fullfils the criteria to stand as equal. Maybe at times the Mansheviks at Lemmygrad might be seen as nearly as good as the Bolsheviks of Hexbear. /s
This is crazy to me. All this time there’s been a 20k user instance out there just chilling by itself, and we may all start talking to each other one day.
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