Yeah both codebases were moving very quickly and by the time the pull requests were compiled and reviewed, both the Lemmy and Hexbear codebases were several commits ahead. It was taking up all the time of an entire core maintainer at Hexbear to manage conflicts and fix pull requests. Meanwhile the site was at the peak of its new launch spike and nearing the peak of the US presidential primary/election cycle, which was r/CTH’s bread and butter. The database was less optimized back then and Diesel did not (and iirc still does not) support cross joins, which was a major detriment to the optimizations Hexbear ended up using

I understood why it was done, but I think if the defork succeeds the end result will be a net positive

In terms of looks, their entire frontend was rewritten from the ground up in React. So some of that may be reusable but I’m sure the design itself will be reused either way