r/cth was originally a subreddit for the podcast Chapo Trap House, but it eventually bloomed into a general-purpose leftist space. IIRC, the sub was around 160k members at its peak and had a distinct posting culture.

It was quarantined by Reddit for violent speech after calling for the death of slave owners and later banned for no particular reason at the same time as r/the_donald, presumably as a “both sides” sort of thing.

Hexbear is an instance formed mostly by former r/chapotraphouse users after that sub was banned from Reddit a few years ago. Hexbear used to run on a custom fork of Lemmy so that the community could add extra features that they wanted (like custom emoji) but it was recently ported back to mainline Lemmy after merging or reimplementing as many changes as possible.

Currently, Hexbear does not have federation enabled, and there is discussion about who to federate with or even whether to federate at all. The community is very active and self-sufficient and some members prefer the isolation.

Content-wise, it’s a leftist-focused instance. Some shitposts, some serious posts, and a lot of inside jokes.

I think an underappreciated thing about the original LEGO Star Wars games is just how accessible they were. You could give those games to a 5 year old and they could play and enjoy it. I should know; I was one of them. Looking at the Skywalker Saga, you couldn’t possibly do the same thing.

Yeah, those were the days. Hexbear carries some of the culture, but is generally a nicer place to be.

Old account here. I was directed to Hexbear after r/cth was banned from Reddit. Later on, I learned about other instances. Federation wasn’t a thing back then; I made an account here to check federation out once it finally released.

I use Elfeed for Emacs, as just one small part of Emacs’s slow conquest of other programs on my computer. Before that, I used Liferea, which is a nice standalone feed reader.

Elfeed lets me assign each feed in my list different tags, so I can do basic filtering for what I want to read at any given time. I generally avoid subscribing to any high-density feeds like news sites. I prefer to have maybe a dozen or so links per day that definitely interest me.

I use morss.it to fetch the full text from feeds that only provide a brief summary.

Shoutouts to the 0.08% of people who are apparently using Haiku for professional work.