"As some of you may know, Hexbear development has been mostly inactive
for a few months now. While the site could survive in this state
indefinitely, there is nobody to fix bugs, and we are missing out on
over a year of progress made on upstream Lemmy. Example features
upstream have since implemented:
- User blocking
- Avatar/banners for users and communities
- Federation
There are many, many others, and the list continues to grow. Going back
to Lemmy would also mean the ability to use Hexbear through mobile apps.
It is unclear if some of our features, such as our emotes and our
featured threads, can be merged upstream. Thus, the proposal is to
**fork Lemmy again**, this time deliberately not diverging too far from
upstream so it's easier to maintain the patches and apply them on top of
each new Lemmy release.
This is a large undertaking. There is no timeline, but we expect it to
be a while before the site is migrated over to the finished fork.
We're still in the early stages, but the more people involved the sooner we can progress. Primarily, we need
developers (Rust & TypeScript) and ops/infrastructure people. Please
reach out to me [via Matrix](https://matrix.to/#/@ella:chapo.chat) if
you're interested in helping out. Thanks all.
"
Nothing official yet, but Hexbear may be bringing some of their previous devs back to contribute upstream. Along with that would come a userbase roughly comparable to lemmy.ml’s daily activity. Their daily megathread regularly surpasses 1000 comments
I hope they do it. I thought it was a mistake when they decided to rewrite the codebase with no hope of merging the federation changes. Federating their community could have brought thousands of active users into the lemmy network. Instead, it became this isolated community. I’m glad they are reconsidering now.
Yeah both codebases were moving very quickly and by the time the pull requests were compiled and reviewed, both the Lemmy and Hexbear codebases were several commits ahead. It was taking up all the time of an entire core maintainer at Hexbear to manage conflicts and fix pull requests. Meanwhile the site was at the peak of its new launch spike and nearing the peak of the US presidential primary/election cycle, which was r/CTH’s bread and butter. The database was less optimized back then and Diesel did not (and iirc still does not) support cross joins, which was a major detriment to the optimizations Hexbear ended up using
I hope they do it. I thought it was a mistake when they decided to rewrite the codebase with no hope of merging the federation changes. Federating their community could have brought thousands of active users into the lemmy network. Instead, it became this isolated community. I’m glad they are reconsidering now.
I understood why it was done, but I think if the defork succeeds the end result will be a net positive
Was it because of the amount of traffic they were getting ior something?
Yeah both codebases were moving very quickly and by the time the pull requests were compiled and reviewed, both the Lemmy and Hexbear codebases were several commits ahead. It was taking up all the time of an entire core maintainer at Hexbear to manage conflicts and fix pull requests. Meanwhile the site was at the peak of its new launch spike and nearing the peak of the US presidential primary/election cycle, which was r/CTH’s bread and butter. The database was less optimized back then and Diesel did not (and iirc still does not) support cross joins, which was a major detriment to the optimizations Hexbear ended up using