hexbear.net is on sale for auction

This almost certainly won't kill the Hexbear community, and frankly I don't think there's any way they will choose to pony up the auction money. This community has moved from reddit to discord to the fediverse and they'll probably just be on their backup/original domain chapo.chat for a month or two before switching over to whatever the admins decide to switch to, and then it will be business as usual under a new name.

Still there's a lesson here about setting up a durable online community - don't let someone control the domain registration with their personal account, you're just asking for something like this to happen. If they don't have one already the admins should set up some kind of organization that can "own" the new domain, donations, etc so that this can't happen again.

They've moved to chapo.chat.

Here's their statement.

The rest of the Fediverse should put together a GoFundMe to buy the domain, and stick up a page with links to donate drones to Ukrainian soldiers, and care packages to families of Uyghur muslims detained in concentration camps in China.

Hexbear isn't worth dogshit but if someone wants to waste their money, then i wont stop them

Bidding ends in 9 days.

Edit: Current bid is up to $305 $505 $676 $710 $1920 $2345 $2365

I am not writing this to shit on them, but I have to appreciate the irony in the situation. Something about a communist community getting messed up by lapses in individual responsibility, or an authoritarian leaning community getting messed up by fuckups in leadership.

Wow, that's a fuck up of monumental proportions. Still 9 days left on the auction, I wonder how much it'll ultimately sell for.

This could be really annoying when they all make accounts on lemmy.ml. Funnily enough, having them sequestered over there and defederated from the rest of us has been working pretty well lately. Moderators and admins better start dusting off the banhammers.

Well I'm impressed that just defederating from them was enough to basically kill the site.

Just add the following line to your host file and add an override to your DNS:

37.187.73.130 hexbear.net

Problem solved, this is how we did it in 1985.

My 3 favorite proposed alternative urls are tank.ie hexbearmoretankie.net and infinity.ai

Popcorn! Get'cher popcorn here! Can't have a good fedidrama without that delicious buttery popcorn!

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's up to $1921 now lol

I enjoyed the community. Hope they find a new home.

Oh wow, this post reminded me to renew some domains I use.

It should probably go to furry coders.

They'll probably stay in chapo.chat, and instance owners will update their blocked lists. A few users lost because they can't be arsed to re-register, instead using .ml. But, past that, not much is going to change, I think.

I'm mildly curious on what's going to happen with their older domain - or, what the winning bidder will make out of it. (Document bad online behaviour? Make it about NATO to rub salt on their wounds? What else?)

Sad but kinda hilarious. Lemmy.ca appears to have a better succession plan in place through the nonprofit organization...

Karma

I've had that happen to some URLs I own before. Basically, they forgot to renew. Normally you get a grace period but some sketchy domain admins take the lapse as an opportunity to auction off what was originally a worthless address now that it has value.

Stop giving them attention. That's the only thing they care about. If a tankie wants to have a 'debate' with you just say 'ok' and move on.

They have no power or any effect on anything. By making them seem bigger than they really are (some niche leftist nutjobs) you only attract new cultists looking to sate their moral superiority kink.

Wait, what??? Isn’t this a hugely active instance? What happened?

I think it's hilarious that there is a bidding war that has been driving the bid up.

We should buy it and turn it into a Lemmy instance that's anti-authoritarian.

I’m bidding. Fuck them.

Is there a remind me bot on Lemmy? Asking for a friend that might do something financially irresponsibly hilarious at last second if the auction values doesn't go much higher.

I'm not up to date with my Hexbear knowledge, is hexbear dead?

Holy smokes, that’s it after all those years.

New update for those of you following this story

We have established contact with the previously-AWOL owner, and after much discussion, we have determined that while there was an error in the auto-payment initially, the renewal funds were transferred manually to Sav and the auction continues despite that. We are currently appealing to Sav support with our domain credentials. We are also looking into whether an ICANN-compliant grace period was implemented prior to the rescinding and auctioning of the domain.

Their instance seems to be back up again. A sad day for us all.

Weird, www.hexbear.net redirects to chapo.chat while hexbear.net doesn't.

don't think I'd give you a dollar for that even if it was signed by Kenny loggins.

who needs the CIA infiltration manual when tankies will do it to themselves?

Every second bid is J_S. Wonder how high they'll go

Serious question: if this happened to a popular federated instance (say Lemmy.world) and it got bought by someone malicious, what's the worst they could do to my Lemmy feed and the Lemmy community in general?

It got bid up to $700 😂

edit: 2300 and growing. Hilarious

my unofficial tribute wall: 1 2

They noticed https://hexbear.net/post/4468531

Hope the new boss isn’t the same as the old boss.

Lol