It means that the Hexbear fork is going to eventually be replaced with a slightly modified version of an up-to-date Lemmy. And that process will involve Hexbear community members contributing to Lemmy to try and get some of the Hexbear-specific features implemented upstream

Yeah both codebases were moving very quickly and by the time the pull requests were compiled and reviewed, both the Lemmy and Hexbear codebases were several commits ahead. It was taking up all the time of an entire core maintainer at Hexbear to manage conflicts and fix pull requests. Meanwhile the site was at the peak of its new launch spike and nearing the peak of the US presidential primary/election cycle, which was r/CTH’s bread and butter. The database was less optimized back then and Diesel did not (and iirc still does not) support cross joins, which was a major detriment to the optimizations Hexbear ended up using

I understood why it was done, but I think if the defork succeeds the end result will be a net positive

In terms of looks, the entire frontend was rewritten from the ground up in React. So some of that may be reusable but I’m sure the design itself will be reused either way

It’s not a cop out. Design has a major influence on behavior, but it’s not a guarantee. Manual community building and curation is still a major part of making a place where people enjoy posting. And the decisions made while community building have a huge impact on the feel of a space. If you’re literally worried about someone exerting excessive social control, how is it a cop out to say that the solution is social? If a user makes up such a large percentage of posts in your feed that them blocking you amounts to censorship, the problem isn’t that the block feature is ill-designed. It’s that the instance is dead. Otherwise it’s a non issue and the most frustrating thing is that you can still see the un-interactable posts in the first place. Because the inability to reply is a surprise. That’s the problem. The solution is to hide those un-interactable posts and comments. If you have literally any solution other than “break the block feature entirely”, I’d love to hear it

Yeah VS Code plug-ins are plentiful. I can’t stand having a different text editor for every language

Some of my least favorite coworkers are going to be very upset tomorrow morning

Ngl this seems like an issue of culture than of technical features. Like I said in the matrix chat about this, if a block feature allows a user to continue commenting on another user’s posts after being blocked, that block feature is broken and it will be taken advantage of by harassers. I know that from experience running an instance with a high number of marginalized users and a couple bigots with way too much time on their hands to spam new accounts. I want to specify that it doesn’t seem like you’ve harassed anyone here. I’m just saying that these are the sorts of situations the feature it intended for and breaking the features is likely not the solution here.

Is it safe to say the underlying issue here is that a user is spending way more time here than most people and is using that to throw their weight around? Because that’s an issue that happens just about everywhere online. Social media is by its nature manipulatable and the more attention someone has to dedicate, the easier that process is