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.
The offer I made last month still stands. Millionaire Hexbear comrades (and President Xi), I will quit my pencil pusher desk job and develop for the site full time for $40k a year. Alternately, I can assist a few hours a week for free.
And all I ask is that like 400 people match that. Shit I’m getting deja vu from a medical gofundme I ran once
I can do $6. My Netflix is almost $20 as is and this would be way better than another season of live action Cowboy Bebop.
Because mobile was mentioned, I'll just say that the mobile experience for me at least is actually pretty solid. I just dragged the site's browser icon to my app screen and can access the site with one button press and the usability is on par with desktop.
Same here, but since the newest iOS update it’s been super super buggy. Dropdown menus don’t work, sometimes I can’t comment, sometimes I can’t upvote, and sometimes it just crashes when I open it.
ooof that doesn't sound good. I'm on android and don't seem to have that issue, hopefully that one is easily resolved
I have an android tablet and an iphone and the experience on android has pretty much always been better than iOS for me. Sometimes on my phone the site hangs up for awhile before loading
What if I’m alrrady doing this and the 1948 Jorge Orwin mods are removing them :jokah-messy:
Yeah for real. I have like a 3rd graders understanding html, css, and git. What can I do?
Donations help sites like these a lot. It is something devs eyeball before they dedicate time - sometimes months - to a project.
My sister runs a niche forum and when donations runneth so does the volunteering.
just checked the donate at the bottom of the page and it leads me to an error page https://hexbear.net/donate Do you know where and how to donate?
Update: Top Navbar Link is working: https://liberapay.com/hexbear
FWIW, they are talking about this over at lemmy.ml and the few comments there are expressing that they're glad to hear this.
I hope they start contributing upstream, their fork looks really nice and ti would be awesome if they could merge some of that.
and
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.
This is a good move, I have questions though. Have the scale issues been solved? Our divergence primarily began because Hexbear had an urgent need to solve scale issues that Lemmy had not encountered yet because it didn't have to cater to anything of our size.
Does this mean we'll get all the customisation features? And does it mean we'll get embedded images? Unique community identity is a valuable feature and has been missing on Hexbear for a long time, it's responsible for the community being unable to get away from everyone treating every comm like it's all the same place. With unique community identity via banners and visible customisation then individual comms will be able to have slightly different identities with different rules and expectations for behaviour. It opens a lot of doors.
Have the scale issues been solved?
Upstream have implemented their own optimizations since we forked, but it's unclear how they compare to ours and if scale issues are solved.
Does this mean we’ll get all the customisation features?
Not sure what you mean, do you mean user avatars etc? Because if so, yes.
And does it mean we’ll get embedded images?
(Tentative) Yes. I don't want to commit to anything, we still have a lot of work to do and this may change.
Agreed on the community customization part. It's one of the more exciting features implemented upstream.
Agreed on the community customization part. It’s one of the more exciting features implemented upstream.
It would make lifeboat communities significantly better for the people that Hexbear absorbs from other platforms. Hexbear users will actually start to treat them like their own separate entities.
their users make waaayyyyyyy more frequent posts (though not nearly the same number of comments, they seem to enjoy linkspam for some reason)
I have suspected for some time that some of it is bot curation. It's something I considered advocating for here, but never got around to. It's something reddit also did when it was younger, and I suspect still does with communities they want to help out. Reddit admins have been quite open about how they used sockpuppets and bots to seed the community with content in their earlier years, I suspect it still goes on.
There's definitely two sides to it, the question is what generates the most growth. I suspect it would be valuable for the hobby communities on the site because curating things like latest major news makes those communities more useful faster than other places.
Usefulness is what generates repeated re-use. If the site is made useful to others more so than elsewhere, they will find themselves using it because it is simply better for the things they want it for. Anime, games and movies for example. Find the right way to curate content for these automatically to make them useful but not full of rubbish and it will add a reason to use the site to the list of reasons people might have. Do this for enough things and eventually you create a daily user. It's about adding value.
I'd post, but I'm an idiot and someone will probably call me a :LIB: and I'm a fragile little boy.
God I wish I could still code and not be a useless team lead.
Honestly helping to manage the issue tracker and scope out features would probably be a pretty useful thing to do
I had checked out the matrix a while ago... maybe I should hop back in and see what's up.
What sort of stuff do you need ops/infrastructure people for? I have a bit of experience
Off the top of my head: generally, stuff like server maintenance, database upgrades, etc. For the fork, we'd probably want to re-think some of our tooling, server-side.
I'm sure this is a very, very naive question, but I've recently decided to learn to code, though not yet where to focus my efforts. If I were to focus on learning Rust & Typescript to begin with, could I as an early novice after a few months of dedicated self-teaching be anywhere near the level required to be at all beneficial to the project, if even in a small way? Or is the situation that to be of any real use, you need developers with significant experience? Just checking. (I did learn some basic many years ago and I have college mathematics education through linear algebra/differential equations).
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
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.
Oh no I mean immersion even just in the dev chat rooms here. I learned so much hanging out in the dev chat before the site launched
Oh ok! Well that I can do. I'm already an expert in lurking.
What's up with hiding posts?...
- Via a "hide" button
-or-
- After you've voted on them
Upstream Lemmy already have this feature (you can hide posts automatically after they're read).
