this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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As I understand it, Hexbear has existed for years before federating with the rest of the network. Someone commented a couple months ago about the closing of the Chapo Traphouse subreddit (2020, same as r/theDonfuck) and users moving there. I believe they already had a strong community before linking up with other instances.
I may be wrong on the details and welcome corrections. Hexbear users: I considered joining your instance when I was still a lurker. Try not to crucify me if I got anything wrong.
Pretty much, the exact timeline is:
2019: Dessalines (and maybe Nutmoic? Not sure when he joined) start making lemmy
June 2020: R/CTH banned
June 2020: they scramble onto lifeboat discord
July 2020: devs make chapo.chat using the lemmy code as an actual replacement for r/cth, at this point federation is not a thing in lemmy yet
~August-November2020: the chapo.chat devs officially fork the code (to add things like emotes, improve performance for their much larger site than lemmy.ml at the time, etc.)
~November 2020: lemmy main code now has federation, chapo.chat’s code is too far removed to remerge, can’t use the federation code
March 2021: chapo.chat renamed into hexbear.net
December 2021: it’s announced that the devs cannot maintain the current fork, and they need to get back upstream to the rest of lemmy code
June 2023: Hexbear gets back close to the rest of lemmy code, still maintains a slight fork, especially for the UI
August 2023: the Hexbears are unleashed
I'd just add that the fork began before the site launched, in that month-long exile period on Discord. Recruiting for the project started on day one, and the deadline got pushed further and further back as we realized the scope of the undertaking. At that point, we had about a dozen volunteers from the community hacking on all sorts of random shit.
We added a comment / post reporting system, added a "site mod" permission (at the time, there were only community mods and site admins, and the site admin page exposed very sensitive operational details), tried to limit the number of embeds which could be included in a single comment (then left it at zero forever due to abuse), added a toggle to shut off community creation, added hCaptcha support, among many other changes. Some of these changes landed upstream early on, but even cherry-picking them was a chore. After the site launched, pronoun tags were added, and we ended up completely porting the UI to React.js for some fucking reason lmao.
so when was the actual official hard fork? I've tried looking through old posts but it's hard to tell with all the deleted posts and comments
iirc it was immediate. it wouldn't be in the post history because it predates the site.
The only reason for this is one of the nerds moved the banner 2 px to the right and the entire community went
mode.
Entirely deserved if you ask me
[extremely Picard voice] THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE!
Pull requests take a lot of time ok
pronouns too actually lol
Upstream lemmy doesn't want them because it's too english-specific and they desperately want lemmy to be general purpose software that can be used by anyone in any language so pronouns are a no-go. It's mostly admirable but sometimes they miss IMO. They want a general purpose flair system and are amenable to having pronouns be configurable as a mandatory flair, but that's a lot of development effort so it hasn't happened for like 2 years running
The only thing I'd add is that federation making it into lemmy's code base did not mean the feature was complete or usable at all. Plus nobody would've wanted to federate with us back then anyhow, since we would've immediately dominated the conversation on any instance, since there were no other large instances around, which was basically the case until this year
Also lots of drama and harassment and people burning out
Edit: oh and actually, it's worth noting, the development effort for re-merging with lemmy wasn't just "migrate our data back to compatibility with lemmy", it was "re-develop from scratch all our custom features and contribute them back to upstream lemmy (if they will take them)"
Hexbear devs (primarily @makotech222) are the reason that Lemmy has Custom Emoji, Taglines, Pinned/Featured posts, and probably a good handful of smaller things I'm forgetting.
Oh yeah. There were a lot of growing pains before the site culture stabilized.
Not that it matters but we were briefly a community of lemmy.ml (dev.lemmy.ml at the time) I between the discord and chapo.chat.
Yep, I think we added some features which broke compatibility with mainline lemmy and it took a while to merge back, but we’ve been around for 3 years.
It mostly was pronouns iirc
Our pronouns were too powerful for lemmy
We were like the second or third most active subreddit on reddit for a while, and when Spez shut us down some quick thinking people created hexbear as a liferaft. We've been growing and mutating in the dark for years while the admins and devs worked on getting our fork from early lemmy to a point where it could re-join mainstream lemmy, which is why we seem like we exploded from nowhere.
It just when different lemmy instances (servers) share content and user interactions instead of existing on one giant instance like reddit.