There's a very real possibility that the Hexbear fork ends up getting used by other sites instead of Lemmy, and eventually Hexbear ends up the 'main' project. This sort of thing happens a bunch with open source projects.
There's also a lot of value to the Lemmy ecosystem if there are a lot of independent(-ish) implementations of the Lemmy federation standard. The more different pieces of software that interact with the same API, the better, in general -- it forces the API information to be more standardised and specific, and encourages new reddit clones to also be Lemmy-compatible.
There's a very real possibility that the Hexbear fork ends up getting used by other sites instead of Lemmy, and eventually Hexbear ends up the 'main' project. This sort of thing happens a bunch with open source projects.
There's also a lot of value to the Lemmy ecosystem if there are a lot of independent(-ish) implementations of the Lemmy federation standard. The more different pieces of software that interact with the same API, the better, in general -- it forces the API information to be more standardised and specific, and encourages new reddit clones to also be Lemmy-compatible.