It's worth noting Lemmy was pretty rough back then and the reason it was forked was because a lot of features we really needed for a forum of this size didn't exist yet, it didn't have anything to do with federation (not saying you suggested that, I just thought that's a misunderstanding which could be read into your comment)

Yeah that's a great point. This history is pretty interesting but I don't know the details too well. I remember the devs made a number of features for our fork that were eventually upstreamed, but I can't remember which ones specifically.

The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit, a subreddit loosely based around a so-called "dirtbag left" podcast but was generally a left-wing shitposting subreddit, got quarantined by the Reddit admins in the late 2010s. At some point in 2020, the community sensed the ban hammer was going to drop and there was a hastily made lifeboat discord that was being posted around the subreddit until an alternative platform could be developed. The ban eventually came and the fraction of the community that made it to the discord waited around for a few months until chapo.chat was born, which was the initial version of this site. That version had been forked far enough away from upstream Lemmy in a way that made incidentally federation impossible, so we were our own site for a couple(?) of years. At some point the community wanted to distance itself from the 'brand' of the Chapo Trap House podcast and decided to rename itself Hexbear, named after a picture that was spammed on the subreddit shortly before the ban, which was just this picture: with the title "Check out this dope ass bear." Eventually after a lot of effort from the dev team, Hexbear was modified to once again be compatible with federation and the community voted on federating with other Lemmy servers on an allowlist basis. That's basically the the tl;dr of the site's history. Nothing major has happened since federation was finally turned on, unless you count the silly fiasco with losing our domain name briefly and we all had to revert to posting on chapo.chat and it looked like we might become Hexbear.chat.

As far as the makeup of the community, I don't think its known how much of the userbase were originally /r/chapotraphouse users and how many have joined since the Reddit ban. I would venture a guess that at least a significant plurality of the people here are probably from the subreddit and either came here directly from the lifeboat discord or were former /r/chapotraphouse posters/lurkers who eventually found Hexbear in the wild.

This kind of post is exactly why I argued for removing those taglines. They're all a niche in-joke that's now quite a few years old (liberals reacting to our presence after initial federation), do not accurately reflect site culture, and, in my opinion at least, convey horrid vibes, especially to new users. The best taglines are ones like the "logging on to hexbear in soviet america" or the muffin pregnancy ones. They're funny and convey the whole "weird communist internet dive bar" vibe infinitely better than random people complaining about us.

https://www.democracynow.org/

Democracy Now is a decent choice for news thats paletable to a liberal but isn't ideologically terrible. They miss sometimes but would probably fulfill the role you're looking for.

Hexbear's mentalhealth comm is abandoned but we have !disabled@hexbear.net (it explicitly includes mental illnesses). It doesn't get a whole lot of posts but the bi-monthly megathread is active.

"women and people who identify as women"

holy fucking shit i absolutely loathe this phrase, id rather be called a slur than basically have been called a slur but in a "woke" way

damn i wish i bet my entire bank account on lula winning the runoffs

Unfortunately the answers are largely furnished by LLMs. There was one a while ago that was like "name a capital city of a province/state" and all the Russian ones I named were on the list.

Half Earth Socialism is a pretty short and niche experience. Based on the book of the same about what is needed to be done to avert the worst of the climate crisis, the game places you in the role of the economic planner for the whole planet following a global revolution in 2020. You have to pass policies, develop new technologies, and reorganize how humanity carries out production while also trying to balance the opinions of various political factions that each have their own approach to the climate crisis, as well as the happiness of humanity at large. It's free on steam, not resource intensive at all, and runs just fine on Linux

Yeah they died with 420chan, so sad

NetJester wasn't a twitter poster, they posted on a niche internet drug forum and sometimes accidentally said profound things