Ive heard that to start a forum you usually have to have some audience / users before hand, as if nobody is posting then nobody signs up. Was that the case for Hexbear? Or did it just pop up one day and slowly grow? Or i guess on the fediverse someone could see your instance from your account and join that way.
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The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit, a subreddit loosely based around a so-called “dirtbag left” podcast but was generally a left-wing shitposting subreddit, got quarantined by the Reddit admins in the late 2010s. At some point in 2020, the community sensed the ban hammer was going to drop and there was a hastily made lifeboat discord that was being posted around the subreddit until an alternative platform could be developed. The ban eventually came and the fraction of the community that made it to the discord waited around for a few months until chapo.chat was born, which was the initial version of this site. That version had been forked far enough away from upstream Lemmy in a way that incidentally made federation impossible, so we were our own site for a couple(?) of years. At some point the community wanted to distance itself from the ‘brand’ of the Chapo Trap House podcast and decided to rename itself Hexbear, named after a picture that was spammed on the subreddit shortly before the ban, which was just this picture:
with the title “Check out this dope ass bear.” Eventually after a lot of effort from the dev team, Hexbear was modified to once again be compatible with federation and the community voted on federating with other Lemmy servers on an allowlist basis. That’s basically the the tl;dr of the site’s history. Nothing major has happened since federation was finally turned on, unless you count the silly fiasco with losing our domain name briefly 
and we all had to revert to posting on chapo.chat and it looked like we might become Hexbear.chat.As far as the makeup of the community, I don’t think its known how much of the userbase were originally /r/chapotraphouse users and how many have joined since the Reddit ban. I would venture a guess that at least a significant plurality of the people here are probably from the subreddit and either came here directly from the lifeboat discord or were former /r/chapotraphouse posters/lurkers who eventually found Hexbear in the wild.
That version had been forked far enough away from upstream Lemmy to make federation impossible, so we were our own site for a couple(?) of years
It’s worth noting Lemmy was pretty rough back then and the reason it was forked was because a lot of features we really needed for a forum of this size didn’t exist yet, it didn’t have anything to do with federation (not saying you suggested that, I just thought that’s a misunderstanding which could be read into your comment)
I don’t think its known how much of the userbase were originally /r/chapotraphouse users and how many have joined since the Reddit ban. I would venture a guess that at least a significant plurality of the people here are probably from the subreddit and either came here directly from the lifeboat discord or were former /r/chapotraphouse posters/lurkers who eventually found Hexbear in the wild.
I would be surprised if it wasn’t still a majority. Federation has brought a slow trickle of users, and a very tiny number of users have come from word of mouth from existing users, but /r/cth was enormous and it would take a lot of attention to beat the userbase we started with. The entire reason /r/cth got quarantined and then banned was because it was such a big and active sub that there was communist propaganda hitting the front page of Reddit constantly and they couldn’t do anything about it.
It’s worth noting Lemmy was pretty rough back then and the reason it was forked was because a lot of features we really needed for a forum of this size didn’t exist yet, it didn’t have anything to do with federation (not saying you suggested that, I just thought that’s a misunderstanding which could be read into your comment)
Yeah that’s a great point. This history is pretty interesting but I don’t know the details too well. I remember the devs made a number of features for our fork that were eventually upstreamed, but I can’t remember which ones specifically.
you gotta admit that is a dope ass bear
false, i see no ass on that bear
you gotta
admitimaginethat is a dopethe ass on that bear
On the first day god created c/main and it was great, posts were flowing, none of the comms were used cos it was a perpetual shitpost feed. And on the second day god took away c/main and its been downhill from there
I genuinely still think trying to force people out of main was a mistake (and is an ongoing mistake)
I miss the chaos. Some shit was always going down, the vague metaposting was off the charts and the site was unusable for weeks post any particular struggle. It was unique if anything but it matched the vibe of the subreddit
yeah hexbear was initially people from the chapotraphouse subreddit and discord server. the site was originally called chapo.chat before it changed to hexbear.net
