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 if you're interested in helping out. If you need help setting it up, let us know. Thanks all.

  • KenBonesWildRide [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Being around other developers and observing them work is a good way to fast track your learning as long as it isn’t overwhelming to you. You could do things like write tests and anything you wrote would receive feedback from a maintainer. Getting anywhere useful in a matter of months is going to be tough, but immersion would be the way to do it

    • InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Thanks, I appreciate the advice. Unfortunately, observing developers in person isn't too likely at this point and I'm assuming discord doesn't cut it in terms of immersion. Regardless, I'll work on it, and maybe in the future I could be of some use. I know I'm far from the only person here who would love to help out but simply lacks the experience and expertise.