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.
My OT sometimes brings her therapy golden retriever and it’s always a treat. Very big and friendly but low energy