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 am a proud Openbox user. In the stacking realm, there is nothing quite like Openbox’s customizeability and the great tooling that surrounds it. In particular, opensnap gives me window snapping to the edge of the screen with the mouse, which is sorely missing from most light window managers. Openbox also has really powerful hotkeys (any arbitrary sequence of actions) alongside Emacs-style key chords, which makes it difficult to port my setup to any other environment.

One day, I hope to migrate to labwc, which seems to be carrying Openbox’s banner into the Wayland era. Unfortunately, labwc doesn’t (and probably never will) support key chords and I have not been able to find a suitable replacement for tint2, which I use as my taskbar. Someday…

Here is an old screenshot of mine. Nothing has changed since then.