"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
In terms of looks, the entire frontend was rewritten from the ground up in React. So some of that may be reusable but I’m sure the design itself will be reused either way
I hope they start contributing upstream, their fork looks really nice and ti would be awesome if they could merge some of that.
We have the best emojis folks, many people are saying this.
Emoji support would indeed be super awesome. but from the comments in Hexbear it seems everyone would like to remain as a fork.
In terms of looks, the entire frontend was rewritten from the ground up in React. So some of that may be reusable but I’m sure the design itself will be reused either way
I hope it does, Lemmy looks okay but it could use a fresh up.
I’m working on redoing posts a bit, but some things I’m changing seem like they were design choices to do the opposite of what I’m doing.