(Temporary moratorium on main rule to encourage more posting on main. We reserve the right to arbitrarily enforce it whenever we wish and the right to strike this line and enforce mainposting with zero notification to the users because its funny)
A hexbear.net commainity. Main sure to subscribe to other communities as well. Your feed will become the Lion's Main!
Good comrades mainly sort posts by hot and comments by new!
State-by-state guide on maintaining firearm ownership
Domain guide on mutual aid and foodbank resources
Tips for looking at financials of non-profits (How to donate amainly)
Community-sourced megapost on the main media sources to radicalize libs and chuds with
Main Source for Feminism for Babies
Maintaining OpSec / Data Spring Cleaning guide
Remain up to date on what time is it in Moscow
Was talking to one of the admins of Hexbear yesterday and found out there is a whole lot of history to Hexbear and I would love to know more and I was told to say and I quote "Hey I'm mainly new to hexbear, please dump site lore on me like you're dumping slop in a pig trough"
So please, dump your lore on me, like I'm a piggy rolling waiting to role around in the mud
Edit:
Wait wait wait the infrahaz tried to make an account here? That could not have gone well.
The reason we don't have
is because certain people were using them to harass our lovely trans comrades and when we got rid of them, all those jerks revealed themselves and got banned real good
Hexbear gotta be easily the most inclusive community I've ever been a part of, as long as you're not a liberal.
And as long as you're willing to learn and not be a 
, we tolerate the libs
As a reformed lib, can confirm
as long as you're not a liberal.
You're all liberals!
anyone to the right of stalin is a fascist, anyone like stalin or to his left is a liberal.
anyone to the right of stalin is a fascist
Ideal Overton Window. I like it. I want a mainstream left so extreme we make Stalin look like the far right.
It's also just generally because downvotes don't do anything good for social media. It's the subject of a few studies that all they really cause is negative behaviour.
There was once a struggle session about indoor cats vs outdoor cats that got so dramatic and lasted so long that it was elevated to the status of hexbear lore in and of itself.
Chapter 1
There is a podcast called Chapo Trap House. It was a goofy name created by a moderately well-off guy named William Meneker. His family business was publishing and writing. His grandfather was caught up in McCarthyism and was actually arrested for being a spy, I think. He became online friends with a guy named Felix Biderman from a moderately well-off area of Chicago. Felix had been doing some writing for independent news outlets and satirical righting for leftist journalism outlets. He was working on a project pretending to be a Bush-Era conservative with his buddy Virgil Texas (pen name). Through the og twitter, they recognized the game of a guy in Michigan or Wisconsin named Matt Christman. He had great posting game. All these guys were huge on pre-2016 twitter. They were arguing with popular liberal conservative journalist, making fun of them, trolling them. In 2014 or 2015 they created a podcast. They were looking for names and just went with Chapo Trap House because the cartel leader El Chapo was in the news and US intelligence has a long history with the drug trade. They use a CIA/DEA military patch as their logo.
There is also a lady name Amber Frost, who was from Kentucky, I think, she had moved to NY and become a feminist socialist journalist. She would guest on the pod and was roommates with Felix. There is also Brendan James, who became a producer for the show but had podcasting ambitions of his own and would later go on to do Blowback.
As a small, amusing, sidenote, Amber and Felix were also roommates with standup comedian Nick Mullen. He was the founder of cumtown. His co-hosts were Stavros Halkias and Adam Friedland. Nick is from Austin, but moved around the country and met Stavros in Baltimore. Adam is from South Africa but moved to the US and met up with Stav and Nick in NY in the standup scene. They started their podcast almost at the same time as Chapo, because they were all hanging out.
Chapo quickly rose to great heights during the 2016 election. They were blamed in the NYT for causing Trump to win due to their negative posting about Hillary. They made a lot of enemies of the wealthy liberal media class for causing mayhem. They were big Bernie supporters. They embodied the idea of the "dirtbag" left. That is young, underemployed leftists who lived in shitty messy apartments, who did a lot of drugs, and didn't really care for the decorum or politeness of modern liberal society and its idpol.
Naturally, there was a fan subreddit created for the podcast. The hosts of the show aren't fans of reddit and did not care to be involved in any of it. They would often joke about hating the sub (they didn't actually hate the users as revealed later). The sub developed its own negative reputation among the broader population of reddit. The old boogeyman was r/ShitRedditSays which was full of "removed" and "social justice warriors" who wanted to spoil everyone's freedom to post in free speech subs such as "r/jailbait". Chapo became a similar boogeyman because users would argue against the omnipresent right wing ideology of the site. After 2016 this was especially bad because chapos were against Hillary and the liberals who were blaming everyone on for being Russian agents. You may notice we have Moscow time on our home page in the side bar, this is a remnant of that.
Eventually there was a massive multi-sub controversy over whether or not John Brown was right to kill slave owners. Reddit's policies were that you can't wish or praise death on anyone. . Given Chapo's past with trolling other subs, this technicality was used to mass report the sub until it was banned. This ban of a popular left wing sub came on the heels of banning popular 4chan-like right wing subs. The bans were also done under spez*.
The chapo users scattered between other subs, and discord. A month or so later, some of them got together to form a lemmy instance called chapo.chat.
*Spez was one of the original co-founders of reddit who left to go be Mark Zuckerberg. While he was gone a lib named Ellen Pao had become CEO of reddit. There was a huge battle to stamp out shitty subs like r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate. She was also in charge during gamergate, which saw a huge right wing influx in reddit. r/ShitRedditSays was replaced by more chud-friendly alternatives and relegated to the dustbin of history. This is when the lib-right divide on reddit began in earnest. Without this you wouldn't have had The_Donald and other popular right wing subs. Ellen Pao cracked down on this too and caused a bunch of disingenuous protest from the user base. It got so bad that the board blamed it on Ellen and kicked her out. Spez waltzes back in, as if it had all been planned, and began a new age of reddit where right wingers were just as valid as anyone else. Shortly after this, was the 2016 election. Spez would go on to form this pattern of banning left wing subs if he was forced to ban right wing subs.
Chapter 2
chapo.chat was started by just a few people from the sub. I know some of their details, but not all and I will skip talking about them. The subreddit was not united, it had its schisms. For the first little while of chapo.chat's existence there was fighting between the admin and outsiders. people from the old sub would come in and bring their baggage and well as discord grievances formed against the admin. This resulted in a lot of slap fights and trolling and call-out posts. There was also some right wing interest in the site once they found out we were a life raft. Eventually though, that all settled down.
Chapo.chat had grown and there were a lot of people who didn't even listen to the pod (ie me). The podcast hosts were mostly white people, and mostly male. The dirtbag image was wearing thin on our marginalized comrades. We wanted to be an inclusive space where em/poc people and the broad spectrum of leftism could hang out. Our site wasn't centered on the podcast, internally, but our name was. A meme on the old sub, before it was banned was "look at this dope ass bear" and it was accompanied by this image:
The admin decided on Hexbear for a new name. The logo was also changed to reflect that. We would go on to grow a bit further from the pod and develop our own culture and memes.
Chapter 3 would be about our struggle sessions, controversies, memes, and that's about it. So I will leave it there.
Telling my kids this is the the old testament
It's funny how this all doesn't seem that long ago.
The logo was also changed to reflect that
No it wasn't. It always was Hexie.
Very sus of you to misremember that.
There is also a lady name Amber Frost, who was from Kentucky, I think, she had moved to NY and become a feminist socialist journalist. She would guest on the pod and was roommates with Felix.
Amber was very performatively anti feminist, to the point of making at least one crack at how feminist critiques of patriarchy were wrong or how #metoo was just for clout or something equally ridiculous every time she was on the pod.
We have the amber bot because people made at least one thread every day about how fucking bad her takes were (Like when she recommended people do entryism in the republican party, or told people that any kind of preventative healthcare was for idiots, or how identity politics is gonna kill the left for the 90th time), and the mods didn't like it.
chapter 3
Stacking outdoor cats in the shape of a downbear struggle session when?
there has only been one good poster here and it was blackmoldfutures. i'm sorry everyone, but i still want bmf back. everyone who disagrees is a DSA Karen
As a cracker anarchist I also still mourn the loss of our most sectarian unhinged poster.
Their almost Unabomberesque ability to phrase things in a way to render them completely indecipherable was always fun to try and parse out
If you only would have accepted to eat the bugs they would still be here smh
Long time ago before we federated anyone we used to use a fork of lemmy, this fork didnt have a limit on the sized of images a poster saw this and ask themselfs
"well then how big can i upload a pic“
So they posted a huge pic they had of a dprk soldier this one
And it crashed the image hosting side of the site, also on the first day the site slowed to a crawl.
For 1 month images on hex were broken and if you look at old posts you will see that there a periods were all images are broken and didnt get fixed
When that poster revealed what they did we all thought it was honestly pretty funny and nowdays we have a few emojis about it
It's one of the funniest things to have happened in a community I've been in online and I've been online since I was a kid in the 90s
The follow up post was effectively uh hey guys my bad and then showing here's what I uploaded and it's the corrupted dprk soldier. Incredible stuff
First 
was made. This turned out to be a massive problem and we're all still paying the price.
There was a guy who rolled in here and was like "hey here's some unreleased footage of the WTC on 9-11 I had sitting around, bye", and it really seemed like that's exactly what happened.
Weird story, might be tricky to dig up the post
u/shitbird created www.shrekland.net at work and sent it to his boss Dave and made all kinds of demands to continue working. His boss got extremely mad
redditors make a demsoc podcast called chapotraphouse but groundbreakingly they say the words "shid" and "fuck". other redditors like this podcast, so they make a subreddit where they socialism around while saying "shid" and "fuck"
liberals and chuds enter said subreddit, and get told to "post hog (their penis)" someone actually posts a picture of their dick in response to this, so it becomes a legendary bit
another bit is the "pig poop balls" where people would trick liberals and chuds into clicking on a link but it was actually just a picture of a pig pooping on its balls
just tons of legendary posters and posts, stuff about judy hopps being acab and shit, truly some greek creation mythology shit
eventually the subreddit gets quarantined, and then banned around same time the_donald (big trump subreddit) so reddit can appear to be 
the stated reasoning for this ban is that chapo posters kept saying "kill all slave owners" and apparently this is a bad thing to liberals
then in the small time before quarantine->ban someone made a lifeboat discord, and then a few people coded the site using a open source fork of the lemmy.ml stuff, most people migrated to the new site chapo.chat (which was soon renamed hexbear.net to remove the connection to the podcast which a lot of people barely listened to anymore(not that a lot of people listened to it when the chapotraphouse subreddit was up lmao))
we get some fun site culture in the moments where we thankfully crack down fuckin hard on transphobia (thanks tc_69) and push the site to read trans liberation: beyond pink and blue
a few years later the site wizards bring the site up to modern lemmy standards and federate with a bunch of people causing lib sites to preemptively defederate.
then the admins/mods do a bunch of hilarious circus fumbles every now and then but they get back up and keep rolling bc at the end of the day not all heroes wear capes some heroes temporarily wear clown wigs and learn from their mistakes and now we're in the modern era
then the admins/mods do a bunch of hilarious circus fumbles every now and then
Admins are circus clowns confirmed
I'm gonna leak the mod chat again here it is:
karl’s dog was named barx
don't stack rocks
I will never regret bringing that up. Perhaps one of the most productive struggle sessions that translates to real life
What happened to the Bureaucrat? I left when they were posting (not because of them), and when I came back they were gone
someone used it to post cringe
Someone(s) was using it to get into struggle sessions as essentially an amorphous anonymized account instead of doing that on their main.
Their main was banned
Someone spent a very long time spamming the site with John Kerry's face as an attempt at wrecking the site. Honestly they were good at it, frequently dodging attempts to stop them.
Eventually either we successfully got rid of them or they realized it was not having the site destroying impact they hoped for so they stopped. But Kerryposting still lives on in our memories as one of the weirdest attempts to shut down a site anyone has ever seen
All of this and I don't see a single 
The hour after the old sub got banned some of us (me included) made a collective account named u/CHAPOTRAPZONE that just aimlessly spammed up lib/maga threads for like a dozen minutes until we got banned lol
Early on, there was someone who posted from an alt that they were a vice president at their company and got roasted for it
