Really came down to the wire to get this done before pride month was over, but, after many months, I'm finally happy with how it looks! This was supposed to be my "low-effort army", so much for that lmao.
Hexbear existed pre-federation as its own little isolated forum that developed a relatively-active userbase with relatively shared ideals. When federation came around, Hexbear was different enough that we couldn't enable it right away and it took much effort from the dev team here to "unfork" us. When federation was finally enabled, our culture clashed with other instances in several major ways:
- emojis were bugged and were enormous when viewed on any other instance
- our high activity and commonality of opinion made other instances think we were constantly botting or "brigading" (its legacy has been preserved in emoji form:
), when in reality it was simply our users posting as they always have - we have a whitelist of instances, and the mod team demands compliance with certain standards. Of particular note due to the current internet culture, for an instance to remain federated with us, they must not be willing to tolerate transphobia by their own userbase. This is a bar that most instances fail to pass.
- we really hate Biden, Harris, and the democrats more broadly for various valid reasons (currently the hot button topic is them carrying out a genocide in occupied Palestine), and libs really hate to hear how the "good guys" are themselves monsters, or seeing "Death to America" regularly.
She did