I haven't logged in for two years. What's the Hexbear lore?

Beatnik stepped down and went away after being accused by an user of grooming and harassment. FWIW the user only ever provided information that was already publicly available, and didn't produce more evidence when asked by other admins (after Beatnik had stepped down).

Since then, we've had struggle sessions over:

• Is it ok to let cats outdoors?
• Is it ok to stack rocks in rivers?
• Is it ok to let vegans chill here?
• Is it ok to let incels chill here?
• Is it ok to dunk?
• Is it ok to complain about he/hims?
• Is it ok to say beanis?

among others.

I think you would've been around for the transphobe purge and TC69 thought. The site culture has honestly not changed that much since then, it definitely was changing a lot in its early stages. We have a news mega where a lot of high quality discussion happens, as well as book clubs, the rest of the site is mostly for taking the piss.

Very recent events but:

We had a really fun account that was shared by like 30 users for about a month before someone went off the rails.

Hexbear was mentioned on Bluesky and a handful of users made accounts here and reposted the recommendation like 100 times.

Bonus, Hexbear got a mention in the chat of popular streamer Northernlion after someone made a joke about treatlerites.

Oh yeah, there's been like two academic papers calling out Hexbear and Lemmygrad as examples of online extremism. Idr how long ago that was.

Lots of containment breaches.

TC69 came back for like a day and left again after the posts caused a stir.

I'm here now I guess

Everyone here is just making shit up. We all waited for you to come back before resuming activities

UlyssesT is gone, a few other power posters have gone on to touch grass, BrookBaybee and another user got engaged, we have a specifically trans comm and a POC comm now, i have a second pup, we're federated with Lemmy as others have said.

Im sure theres more.

i posted my hamster a bunch until it turned me trans

I hope you're okay with Lemmygrad users floating about (I know its a sectarianly Marxist-Leninist site, but there are no other allies like it, besides Lemmy.ml, which is a mixed bag)

Oh yeah, besides that, we also defed'd from other reactionary instances (mostly over geopolitical squables about China, Russia, and the like who we critically support as a counter-balance to U.S European hegemony, and vibes), such as lemmy.world, sh.itjustworks, slrpnk.net (more lib than rightist), beehaw.org, and recently jlailu.

TC69 returned for two days, created a massive shitshow and then deleted her account. Good times.

There was this dude UlyssesT who flew off the handle with emoji spam whenever anyone said something marginally liberal, he went offline to kill Kissinger and succeeded

fakenews is still funny, don't talk about lions, the great dunk bifurcation

what've you been up to the last two years that found you not logging on, OP?

as for lore, a few communities were removed and a few were created. dunk tank got removed cause there was too much low effort posting plus dunk tanks originate from racism. i think some mods or admins left but i didnt keep up with all that

there's a 24/7 hexbear degrassi stream now

Were you here for 70 Trillion and the News Mega thread? It evolved out of the Ukraine war Mega thread.

Nothing really important. You're good.

there's still some terrible posters out there but thankfully i'm still here in the vanguard defending against them

Six months ago I came back after a 1.5 year hiatus and asked the same thing, consensus was mostly federation happened and hexbear is at least 150% transer

Welcome back