A lot of the people here were berniebros, even active with the campaign afaik but then it became painfully apparent that he was controlled opposition and most see him as a sad joke now

Yeah, Hexbear is ultimately the offshoot of /r/chapotraphouse. The subreddit was quarantined for a time and then eventually banned. In the last few days people were spamming a discord server to serve as a lifeboat to carry the community until a site could be built. Not sure how people knew the ban hammer was coming, but a few thousand people hopped aboard and a few months later chapo.chat was born, initially a modified fork of Lemmy which precluded federation because of the extent of the modifications. At some point we renamed ourselves Hexbear to distance ourselves from the Chapo Trap House podcast. The name was derived from this picture of a bear , which looks hexagonal, that was being posted about in the subreddit shortly before the ban with the title "check out this dope ass bear."