A social network that was formed as a fork of lemmy, before lemmy had really entered the fediverse (tho they were planning to). Both Lemmy and Hexbear had communists among their founders, but the Hexbear devs found it more... Central to their objectives. When Lemmy federated, Hexbear didn't. It planned to initially, but ended up being pretty satisfied of being a small, yet centralized social network, basically a communist Reddit. But the idea of joining the Fediverse appeared tempting once again with the boom that happened on Mastodon when the muskrat ate the bird, and to a greater extent when Reddit changed their API policy and lost a lot of the user's trust, causing many redditors to move to Lemmy.

Hexbear devs then worked to essentially make it a Lemmy instance, but there were always disagreements about who to federate with. They first federated with Lemmygrad and Lemmy .ml. Lemmy .world quickly blocked them. They temporarily federated with sh .itjust .works, but this wasn't well received on either side, so this was soon undone.

Ideology wise, pretty much everyone on Hexbear is some kind of communist. However, altho the "tankie", pro-russia type is often seen, it's not that homogeneous (there are even anarchist channels over there), arguably less than lemmygrad.