After the dev exodus the philosophy appears to be "don't touch anything, it might break".
I remember seeing a call for new devs after the exodus this year, but I haven't been following that too much.
Update, here's the thread: https://hexbear.net/post/111852
Hey there! I’m involved with the dev team. Development is completed on a volunteer basis as folks have bandwidth and want to pick up issues for new features and bug fixes. We recently rolled out an upgrade to our frontend, for instance.
A number of previously active members of the core dev team have either stepped away from the project and other maintainers have ongoing life commitments they have to prioritize ahead of the project.
We also actively have folks on the DevOps side to keep the site maintained and its dependencies updated. That allows us to continue making improvements to infrastructure.
Our codebase forked entirely from Lemmy about a year ago and shifting back over to vanilla Lemmy isn’t feasible at this stage of the project.
In addition to our custom emoji features, we also have pronoun tags, moderation features, and changes around performance improvements. We continue wanting to implement ActivityPub in the future to enable wider federation.
Walled gardens are not the vision anyone on the team has for the future of the internet and we’re strong believers in the fediverse.
We’ll have another dev team drive in the future to help ramp back up further. Viva la hexbear!
I’d much rather visit hexbear from my own server.
I don't really follow lemmy/mastadon stuff, what does this mean :meow-floppy:
It's the key of what ActivityPub/Federation is.
You don't need an account on mastodon.social to interact with users on that server/instance. You can put up your own Mastodon/ActivityPub compliant server and interact with them. The example they like to use is how email works.
Another way to explain it, would be like if you could follow Twitter users from your Facebook account.
Oh, so if you've got a lot of different mastadon affiliated sites u use, u can have all their content in one place, gotcha
Yep. The idea is that as long as they all speak the same language (the language being ActivityPub), you can interact.
Very neat. I'm not very techy but I have friends who are, so I'm trying to get a better sence of what techy types are into actually doing with their computer knowledge.
Yeah, I'm a fan of the idea. I think it's a good way of fixing the issues inherent in current social media.
I would want to do more, but I'm dumb and haven't had time to invest in learning it
Forgot what the exact text of it was but the gist is that the site is so toxic that it drove away the people that created it.