Hex was conceived in a Paris brothel, fathered by a liberal priest and a notorious whoremonger from Brussel. As far as we know, there was no mother involved. From the beginning life was disturbing for young Hex, certainly it was no Paddington “bell vita”. At the age of 18 (months) Hex was placed into foster care by the French Aide sociale à l’enfance (ASE), which operates within a strong framework on a territorial basis, with priorities and protocols being decided in each of France’s 101 départements. Unknown to most, the agency is source of a notorious human trafficking network, and so it was that young Hex found themselves living rough, on the mean streets of René-Goupal, a notorious quarter of Montreal, or as the Chicagoans pronounce it, Moan-real… (TBC, should sufficient interest manifest itself…)

When the subreddit was quarantined, a couple diaspora communities were started in anticipation of a ban. One being the discord server, the other was this lemmy instance crafted up.

There’s basically no affiliation aside from the origin story of coming from a sub named for the podcast.

The sub was closed over “violent threats”, basically the members would not stop saying that john brown was right to kill slave owners and that slave owners should be killed. Many think that the sub was banned mostly to keep things equal when the_donald was banned. I think it was a combination of fash reddit admins taking offense to violence against slave owners, and using the_donald banning as an opportunity to say “look we hate all extremism”.

Edit: lmao how did i get it so wrong, I’ve been here since the first days and I’ve totally forgotten the details of how it went down, and I was fuckin addicted to refreshing /r/cth.

Any one have a copy of the “my dad works at reddit” post that predicted us getting bothsided by reddit a day later ?

That’s our lore.

Alright I’ll have a go.

The CTH subreddit got quarantined. Partly for being a leftist subreddit that was revolutionary and blasting off in popularity, and partly because it was run like a crack house and its userbase behaved like that’s exactly what it was. This was hilarious and partially responsible for its popularity, but also not so good when it comes to placating admins. This of course gave them pretty easy excuses to come down on it.

The quarantine didn’t work however, quarantines on reddit are supposed to kill subreddits. They’re supposed to stop growing and they’re supposed to go into a decline spiral that leads to them eventually just fizzling out. For CTH this was not occurring, it continued to grow albeit at a slower pace. Only a ban could stop it.

Many reasons are given for the ban, “slave owners should be killed” is the main one. I don’t think it matters too much what the exact reason was because they wanted to do it and would have found anything to excuse it.

The ban came unexpectedly and the subreddit was not prepared. A very hasty lifeboat was set up on discord which turned into a shit show for various reasons because discord always turns into a shitshow.

Then Chapo.Chat was born. Eventually people decided to rename it Hexbear because association with the podcast was hurting initiatives to reach out to people, many of which didn’t want to be associated with the podcast. Thus the name Hexbear was born, which worked out really because Chapo.Chat already used Hexbear as its logo, very little change was necessary.

The site started out pretty much just like r/CTH, utter chaos and a lot of emotions that probably could have led to it being closed down if various people weren’t convinced to just continue the long march and pushing on. It mellowed out considerably over time.

The name Hexbear itself literally just comes from the “Look at this dope ass bear” meme that was extremely popular on the subreddit.

i absolutely did not think we were gonna get banned until we did. I was making john brown post and saying BAN US YOU COWARDS. and then they DID.