Interesting. Hadn’t thought about the amount of posting done on hexbear. Do you know why they kinda defederated and are now re-federating?

It was caused by technical differences in goals. At the time Hexbear came over things were built in a rush because /r/chapotraphouse had just been banned and there was very limited time to rescue some of the userbase who had migrated to a discord as a lifeboat.

Lemmy at the time was early development, and was absolutely not capable of sustaining the MASSIVE amount of activity that thousands of CTH users would create.

So Hexbear forked and developed solutions to handle the high load they needed while Lemmy at the time was pursuing other priorities - federation wasn't a thing and they had to achieve federation by a certain deadline to get some of the funding grants they were getting.

This difference in priorities led to the situation, and then Hexbear coming back took a very large amount of time because it was not trivial to migrate without massive issues. On top of that it was handled by dozens of different people throwing in help for free. Burnout and motivation play significant factors there. They will be federating with a limited list soon, I believe the intention is not to federate with anywhere that hasn't blocked meta though which makes me unsure about whether they will federate here because of the soft stance this instance took.