It was about 6 months into the covid crisis. I was browsing the chapotraphouse subreddit through a VPN while on the clock. It was one of my favorite subreddits because it was one of the only places which was completely uncritical in its support for the George Floyd uprising (the true reason for the ban, in my opinion). It got banned while I was reading it. A couple hours later, I was called to a meeting and told I was being furloughed because of the pandemic-induced economic standstill. In the meantime, someone set up a “lifeboat” discord server. Within a day or two, about 10,000 people ended up there from the 140,000 subscribers to the subreddit. I joined a group of a dozen or two people who decided to grab Lemmy, an emerging Fediverse platform (which was very bare-bones at the time and did not even support federation yet), kick the tires, and do what we could to make it suitable for such a chaotic situation. About a month later, we got chapo.chat online. We had dubbed our bespoke Lemmy fork “Hexbear.” Eventually, the site name and domain was changed to match when we decided the community had much broader interests than just a podcast.