Old lifeboat from the r/chapotraphouse banning 3 years ago. It almost instantly became the largest lemmy instance at the time and so the devs next bunch of patches were optimising so our servers weren’t crash constantly. I think that state of affairs kinda maintained until the reddit blackout. Officially, it’s non-sectarian leftism, but practically speaking it’s a more shitposty less serious lemmygrad with way higher throughput. Also for a non-trans focused space online, it’s very trans.
The name itself was just the meme that was popular on r/cth at the time of shutdown ("Look at this dope ass bear "), and there was a vote to move away from the podcast themed name.
Because of the load and a few other things (I don’t remember, I’m sure there was drama), there was a lemmy fork that only recently got reintegrated, but it means hexbear is now federated into the lemmyverse.
It only gets corrupted by state department interests if it gets popular, so we must work to make it less popular! (edit: I hope its obvious this is a joke)