ah yes my favorite website [old-meme-no-one-cares-about].com
Ignoring that, it does actually work for the name of a random mastadon/lemmy type website. It's clean of pre-conceptions, low probably of getting mentally clobbered by similar terms/phrases (e.g. sexbear does not exist in any vernacular or memespace). It's also witchy if you're desperate to make up reasons to retroactively justify the decision.
The site used be chapo.chat because it was setup by a lifeboat discord server from r/chapotraphouse (which despite the name only had the most tenuous historical link to the podcast and was just a general leftist sub that managed to avoid being sectarian).
Eventually there was an open discussion about a new name to establish the site as its own standalone community and to drop the chapo reference in the name due to there not being a link to cth anymore, and hexbear either was the most popular or just got picked by admin fiat, I can't remember which. I do remember some people being mad about it, but that went away quick one way or another.
That era saw the admins make a lot of changes I was initially skeptical of, but each decision drove away reactionaries so now I love our big beautiful admins.
It wasn't admin fiat or the most popular, it was a weird middleground. it was the result of a long discussion in user union, but a lot of people who didn't go onto user union much had no idea that discussion was even happening.
I was one of those people and I felt blindsided and hated the change at first. But it's definitely grown on me since then
I remember the userunion thread since I always sorted by all/new and checked all/hot occasionally to see if I'd missed anything, but I couldn't remember what the actual results in it were just the ultimate result of the name change.
Did the vegan struggle sesh of (2020?) not have anything to do with the name change either? I remember this place was in shambles when that was happening, with all the brigading and what not. The name changed def coincided with with the mass ban wave of the time.
But maybe this is just my own revisionist history or something idk
Because a group of libs hated when it was called chapo.chat because "we needed to be more open and chapo would be controversial to new members" all before deciding a week later that converting new members sucked dick and no one wanted to do the work.
This community and site are directly from the reddit chapotraphouse sub. The site was originally named chapochat but eventually changed. The bear picture was posted on the sub like 3 times before being banned.
Its way easier to tell my friends about "my silly bear site" over "a site that uses the name of an unrelated podcast, due to its spiritual ties to a defunct subreddit that was initially based on said podcast but quickly detoured and the podcast didn't actually like the subreddit anyway, where the podcast randomly chose their name based on a small giggle about the cartel boss el chapo which was sorta funny in 2016"
Because we're communist mages and witches who hexed all the capitalists imperialist running fascist govt across the world. The 🐻 is spiritual representation of our hex, which will be granted when all the bears of the world maul the billionaires.