"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 this goes through, it would be great to have another major instance doing it’s own thing and would help avoid the semi-problem of lemmy.ml being the de-facto instance with the most activity by far. As it is hexbear has locked new comm creation, which if brought over through the lemmy migration would incentivize using existing communities on other lemmy instances.
I hope this goes through, it would be great to have another major instance doing it’s own thing and would help avoid the semi-problem of lemmy.ml being the de-facto instance with the most activity by far. As it is hexbear has locked new comm creation, which if brought over through the lemmy migration would incentivize using existing communities on other lemmy instances.