Poor decisions and inexperience initially, but it would have happened anyway. Lemmy was not functionally capable of having the amount of activity on it that Hexbear was getting, and Lemmy dev at the time Hexbear was launching had completely different priorities to Hexbear dev. Hexbear was forced to develop with a “we absolutely are forced to do this by the total amount of activity we have” whereas Lemmy was focused on achieving federation to meet (I think) targets to receive some funding stuff at the time.
This difference in priorities would have forced the two apart one way or another even with some of the poor decisions. I think part of it was also that nobody really knew what volunteer problems would happen down the line, that key skills would just walk away from the project due to burnout from early wrecker dramas, etc etc. I also suspect that with the nature of CTH being banned suddenly with nothing up and running a lot of things were also rushed because the discord lifeboat was a drama magnet that was imploding at the time too, but I’m just speculating on that one.
Hexbear received fed interest from the very start and is directly named in one think tank report by Australian feds too. It’s fair to say they’ve probably been actively involved in trying to destroy it from the beginning.
It’s cool, it’s interesting to understand how real material differences between the teams led one to diverge out of necessity. Hexbear literally couldn’t exist without doing so. But yeah, problems now that it really needs help from genuinely interested people in reversing to get back on track. I think it will always be slightly different to a standard lemmy instance but it needs the core to be the same to get in-line with longterm lemmy dev. Various features of Hexbear like the emotes are just objectively brilliant though and I know they won’t part with some of their features. The community has too much fun with them and uses them to great effect in constructing and maintaining site culture.
But why did hexbear decide to fork lemmy instead of contributing to it directly? They would have been federated by now.
Poor decisions and inexperience initially, but it would have happened anyway. Lemmy was not functionally capable of having the amount of activity on it that Hexbear was getting, and Lemmy dev at the time Hexbear was launching had completely different priorities to Hexbear dev. Hexbear was forced to develop with a “we absolutely are forced to do this by the total amount of activity we have” whereas Lemmy was focused on achieving federation to meet (I think) targets to receive some funding stuff at the time.
This difference in priorities would have forced the two apart one way or another even with some of the poor decisions. I think part of it was also that nobody really knew what volunteer problems would happen down the line, that key skills would just walk away from the project due to burnout from early wrecker dramas, etc etc. I also suspect that with the nature of CTH being banned suddenly with nothing up and running a lot of things were also rushed because the discord lifeboat was a drama magnet that was imploding at the time too, but I’m just speculating on that one.
Hexbear received fed interest from the very start and is directly named in one think tank report by Australian feds too. It’s fair to say they’ve probably been actively involved in trying to destroy it from the beginning.
Cheers thanks for the detailed explanation
It’s cool, it’s interesting to understand how real material differences between the teams led one to diverge out of necessity. Hexbear literally couldn’t exist without doing so. But yeah, problems now that it really needs help from genuinely interested people in reversing to get back on track. I think it will always be slightly different to a standard lemmy instance but it needs the core to be the same to get in-line with longterm lemmy dev. Various features of Hexbear like the emotes are just objectively brilliant though and I know they won’t part with some of their features. The community has too much fun with them and uses them to great effect in constructing and maintaining site culture.