hexbear.net is on sale for auction
Auction: https://www.sav.com/auctions/details/7073489/hexbear.net
Not sure what will happen, but seems to be a Fediverselore event for sure
Update: post from hexbear admin on chapo.chat: https://chapo.chat/post/4468531
They've moved to chapo.chat.
They didn't really move. That hostname has been a synonym for hexbearnet all along. It may have been the instance's original hostname.
How does anyone know that this is a fair auction. As much as the users may be hated or disliked, I still don't believe in companies or corporations taking advantage of people like this to make a cheap buck.
Who's to say that every bid in the auction is being artificially raised by a company rep and no matter what amount anyone comes up with, the owner will just keep raising it until they find a really high value.
Shitty situation all around and as much as they are not liked, I wouldn't want anything like this happening to any honest instance out there.
I dont think anyone on hexbear is actually bidding on the auction. For one most users are poor and the consensus seems to be that any money that would go to cyberlandlords would be better served in the mutual_aid comm. Like if someone wants to spend money on hexbear, they should spend it on those that need it the most.
Thats always risky and I highly doubt it, they could just not buy it and then they're stuck holding the domain and can't sell it for a cheaper price immediately after
Thanks! Unlike a lot of Lemmy users, I have a soft spot for hexbears. I think they had a genuinely traumatic experience when they federated and their very personal instance was inundated with people who didn't think and talk as they did. I'm glad they're ok.
they had a genuinely traumatic experience
Jesus Christ, this is so ridiculous. They federated on their own accord, and from what I've seen very little non-hexbear users ever came to post on hexbear communitites. Seeing some new users in your online community who disagree with you isn't fucking traumatic, in fact these people adore arguing and "dunking" on "libs".
Ah, I saw a lot of people traumatized by their posting, but it is the first time I hear about the opposite.
Their community reminds me of that one Something Awful subforum with the same style. I guess hexbear is just a younger demographic
Thanks, added to the OP
Updated my blocklist, thank you
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.
Honestly I'd donate. Would love to see them seethe.
I'd rather people just fund their instances or the developers
I wonder if the high bids will actually go through or if it's just trolling. Definitely weird to give such big amounts of money away for a joke outside the space where it's needed.
care packages to families of Uyghur muslims detained in concentration camps in China.
So right to the pockets of Adrian Zenz?
If I had the money I'd buy it and replace every post with goatse.
EDIT: wtf the insane asylum is loose. Halp
yes let's sexually harass all those people depending on our mutual aid comm. you're so righteous.
You'd be buying the domain name, not the lemmy instance. So if you wanted to replace every post with whatever, you'd first have to set up your own server and create a new lemmy instance for your newly purchased domain name. You'd have to take extra sets then to mangle your lemmy instance such that it didn't show the real posts but instead showed what you wanted...
In the end that technical work would be more expensive than the domain name... and probably not worth the effort for a short-lived and mean-spirited joke.
Bidding ends in 9 days.
Edit: Current bid is up to $305 $505 $676 $710 $1920 $2345 $2365
Now I wanna raise a bunch of money to buy it and use it as a good way to document shitty behavior on the internet.
What a fascinating idea! Though I'd say there were many decent people there, I think.
That's going to be crazy
As @Sunshine@lemmy.ca mentioned it's now at $505.
What's up with j_s_0e6b87? (Let's call them JS). If they really want the address that's the wrong way to go - bidding too high, too early, too often, and in a bidding war against everyone else. A better approach is to wait until the last hours and then try to snip it.
Unless their goal is to raise the prices this way?
EDIT: currently $676. JS is in a bid war with TB (t_b_2a08d7), a newcomer. 🍿
Wouldn't it be better to agree whatever bit yall want to do with the domain name and spend the money on something more productive? Here's a father trying to buy his kid a new leg after Israel blew it off.
I speak for all of hexbear when I say the domain isn't worth that much, and losing it to capitalism is a funny bit, redirect it to /r/neoliberal or the wikipedia article on economics or the Black Book of Communism or something. Maybe declare Juan Guaidó the interim president of hexbear and redirect to his twitter.
Losing it to some anticommunist "left" weirdo to flex how much money they are willing to waste on an internet grudge instead of helping literally anyone is less funny.
JS has bid 26 times now without missing a beat. It's up to $2,345. That's insane.. and with 8 days left! Like bruhh what?? I refuse to believe they genuinely want to purchase it vs just driving up the price.
To the moon. Still 9 days to go, now $676
If the highest bidder refuses to pay up, will it pass to the next one down?
Cause I feel lile some of those higher bids would just evaporate and it'd make perfect sense to place say a 500 bid rn (1920) just in case, if you were so inclined to decorate the domain after aquisition
Edit: And also it would mean you could start a bidding war with hexbeareans to drive up their cost to the maximum they would pay, without any risk to yourself as long as you remained anonymous
Supposedly they don't bid.
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.
Not so much irony as in keeping with historical precedent.
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.
It would probably be easier for them to keep chapo.chat. Should they massively move to lemmy.ml and recreate their communities there, I guess a lot of instances would start to defederate lemmy.ml
Reading through the admin’s post it looks like they have the exact same issue with chapo.chat being registered by an admin who is no longer active and not responding to the rest of the admin team. They explicitly say to view the move to chapo.chat as temporary unless they can get control of that domain.
Sounds like a good lesson for them and many other fediverse instances to form some sort of non-profit/club/organization legal entity and better ensure that these critical items are open to multiple individuals to reduce the bus factor. I would assume having a legal entity would make it easier to get donations to cover costs too.
What is chapo.chat? I can see that it runs Lemmy 0.19.8 but is it just not federated or something?
Well I'm impressed that just defederating from them was enough to basically kill the site.
What? That has nothing at all to do with the reason the domain expired. It has been in a predicament for a while, site admins lost contact with the owner of the domain name. This has been coming for some time.
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.
Ps. I was born in 1989. Lol
so that IP resolves to https://chapo.chat/ but it uses the Hexbear.net's resources?
oh now I understand...
yes that is the mirror hostname basically (they already had in the past as well).
But I'm now for example able to just visit: https://hexbear.net/communities. And yes I do believe we just reach the same server actually (more or less, maybe kept in sync manually).
I've done that as late as the 2010's, but I am old timey
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!
Don't forget all the sparkling water provided by the colourful users of hexbear.
I enjoyed the community. Hope they find a new home.
They went through ban wave after ban wave and even their own internal dev team got burned out on the drama. I can't say I'm surprised by this, but its the inevitable attrition that happens when you eat your own tail for years on end.
They're a bunch of Fascists disguised as Communists. Don't understand why anyone would enjoy spending time in that shithole.
Oh wow, this post reminded me to renew some domains I use.
It should probably go to furry coders.
Hex bears ain't got nothing on octal wolves
i would love for hexbear.net to have a single image of a cute furry bear, nothing would make me any happier than that event.
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?)
Except they already said that the same issue will occur with the backup name as well. Unless the additional time allows the original owner to finally reregister it this time, as they (reportedly) claimed to be ready to do for the main one as well. I think they don't trust them anymore:-).
So everyone might move, then have to move again a second time. Not joking btw!:-)
Is it weird that I feel bad for them? Whoever is to blame, a lot of the users are innocent of this. And are also trolls, true, but even so... It would be nice if some people would learn from this that online trolling is one thing, but eventually it's even better to wake up and live in the real world. I want that for them.
I think that the additional time will be enough to let them contact the original owner. But dunno, there might be some drama involved, IIRC not even the original devs want much to do with HB.
And even if they move twice, the userbase seems close-knit enough to follow without too many losses.
Is it weird that I feel bad for them?
I don't think it is. The main problem there seems to be users going rogue outside their home instance; I remember HB had some rule like "respect rules of the other instances you interact with", but it was toilet paper. However plenty of the other users are completely OK.
Another issue is that there is some red scare against them. And even if they use it to shield themselves from actual criticism in a really dumb way, the red scare is still there.
re-register
Why do you think their old accounts won't work? It's just a different domain name. They didn't lose data.
Sad but kinda hilarious. Lemmy.ca appears to have a better succession plan in place through the nonprofit organization...
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.
Looks like it expired last month so they had a 1 month grace period
I am willing to bet that the contact person is either gone or not checking email. It wouldn't surprise me if they lost access to the portal.
Ironic that it's capitalism that's going to take down Hexbear.
I found some people alleging the sav.com is sketchy about other aspects of their service. It wouldn't surprise me if they tactically overreacted to a single missed email, or a single expired credit card, or something like that, to squeeze their client for more money.
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.
The tankies are kinda dense but the foreign influencers have some fire memes.
I get your point but this is fucking hilarious
Karma
this, exactly. That the communism site is being sold to the highest bidder is karma, just like the oppressive action of capitalism driving escapism into communism is.
the raw reality is that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism will work. It's like saying "top-down architecture is better than peer-to-peer architecture," or vice-versa. it's foolish. the right architecture depends on the situation being addressed.
I’d downvote you, but you’re at 9/11 upvotes/downvotes and I don’t want to ruin it
I think it's hilarious that there is a bidding war that has been driving the bid up.
Wait, what??? Isn’t this a hugely active instance? What happened?
https://lemmy.ca/comment/14489378
Apparently they didn't pay for their registration renewal. Watch out for a flood of displaced tankies, you can usually find them by saying fuck Putin, or fuck Xinnie the pooh, and they'll just put themselves so you can block them.
We should buy it and turn it into a Lemmy instance that's anti-authoritarian.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works already exist tho
Edit: oh, you edited your comment to "anti-authoritarian" instead of "anti-tankie." Neither Lemmy.world nor sh.itjust.works applies now.
We should buy it and turnt into a Lemmy instance that's only bears in hexagons.
Bears coding in hexadecimal.
Sounds like a superbowl 2.0 opportunity!
I’m bidding. Fuck them.
Rent free.
If you go to their megathread on the topic you'll see that not only are they not bidding, they're telling people not to bid on their behalf and go to their https://chapo.chat/c/mutual_aid comm and give the money to someone who needs it. So if you have 300+ bucks to set on fire please consider helping someone with their rent or groceries. Or on the kid from Gaza trying to raise money for a prosthetic leg. You'll feel better than spending it on spite.
Please someone cover my monthly expenses (equal to the current bid) . As a commie tankie trans girl this would own me epically
spending hundreds of dollars on a domain to own the commies, that's so epic chungus, take my updoot good sir
It's funny, even on the reddit post about it everyone shamed OP saying "are you serious? Spend your money on something worthwhile instead of acting like a toddler." Hexbears aren't even trying to bid on it.
How's your bid going? Top is $676 now. I wonder if it'll go to ,$1000. I wonder how many of the bidders are from hexbear, trying to save it
Holy smokes, that’s it after all those years.
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.
Your phone has a reminder feature that doesn’t spam the rest of us. You can even put links in your reminders!
Their instance seems to be back up again. A sad day for us all.
A sad day for us all.
Lol, you fucking baby
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.
Oh interesting
I'm not up to date with my Hexbear knowledge, is hexbear dead?
Hexbear (edit: is very much alive) was very much alive until my cached DNS values dropped out, and now they're dead. Looks like they're fucked.
It looks to me like sav.com is some kind of domain name scammer. They trick people into registering their domains with them by offering low prices, and then some time later once you've come to depend on the domain, proceed to some kind of abusive process like this where they'll let totally separate people (allegedly-real separate people) "bid" on your domain, and force you to pay whatever exceeds the highest bid, if you want to keep control of it. I honestly don't know how it is allowed.
It looks to me like Hexbear got suckered into registering with them, displaying the same savvy critical thinking skills that serve them so well in so many other areas. I don't think the domain expires until a year from now? Am I misunderstanding, or is sav.com just getting the jump on extorting some money from Hexbear? I realize it would be funny to jump in and bid the price up, but be aware that (1) you are giving money to some genuinely godawful people, quite a bit worse than just a bunch of confused aggressive pro-left people, if you win (2) you won't even get your entertainment until a year from now, unless I am misunderstanding something.
Edit: If anyone's curious, Hostinger has extremely cheap domain registrations: https://www.hostinger.com/domain-name-search
They also have an endearingly janky AI assistant that likes to pop up the most hilariously wrong AI descriptions of whatever domain you are registering, for no reason at all. It goes with the rest of their endearingly janky hosting service. I honestly don't mind it, I like them.
Edit: Guys, I am sad to report that they fixed the AI assistant. It now (still for no reason) displays back to you a summary of what you want to use your domain for, but they've fixed the AI involved so that it no longer gives suggestions that are hilariously wrong. It's just accurate and boring. I wish I had saved some of the ones it showed me way back when they first introduced it, because they were wonderful.
Their domain expired a month ago, this is pretty normal for a registrar to do with expired domains.
Updated Date: 2025-02-11T17:35:29Z
Creation Date: 2021-01-12T00:35:25Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2025-01-12T00:35:22Z
HOSTINGER IS LITERALLY A SCAM WHAT, known scam within the community for doing exactly what you claim sav does insane af that you would suggest that, look around reddit or lowendtalk. Actually comedy to see that suggestion under you making those claims about sav.com lol.
They literally had the chance to renew at the low price and just put it off and lost contact with whoever owned the domain, for some reason they didn't have multiple users with the login. Easy way toa void this wouldve been transferring the domain to the person hosting and paying the 12$ within the year they had to do it.
Weird, www.hexbear.net redirects to chapo.chat while hexbear.net doesn't.
DNS caching at play. The registrar has pointed it to their own nameservers, and that gets cached in lots of places.
Ooooh. That explains it. Yeah, it just switched over to the redirect to sav.com for me.
I think they're fucked. Because of how Lemmy does federation, there's no way that I know of to switch the domain for an existing instance without changing the name and making everyone resubscribe to everything. Although, they probably talk mostly to one another so they could probably change the name to hexbear.social or something with just a little temporary disruption if they don't feel like coming up with $300. Personally, I definitely wouldn't want to cooperate with the domain extortion, I'd rather change domains.
How doesn't that break federation? Or are they starting over?
For me, both redirect to chapo.
With different messages on top that aren't friendly to hexbear.
WTF is going on here?
Hexbear has taglines that contain some of the funniest things said about Hexbear, or just funny in general. This is standard for Hexbear, if you refresh the page the taglines change.
don't think I'd give you a dollar for that even if it was signed by Kenny loggins.
Danger Zone!
Hey, what the shit, 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
I kinda wanna bid them up, but I am the broke and don't want to spend unnecessary moneys right now
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?
Not much. The domain isn't the server. Hexbear will be fine, under another name.
Not much than any other server can already do, for which you could block them if they post spam or host illegal stuff etc..
Create a frontend that has a proprietary algorithm and ads. Completely shut down .world from the rest of the fediverse and then do whatever they want.
It got bid up to $700 😂
edit: 2300 and growing. Hilarious
1900+ !
They noticed https://hexbear.net/post/4468531
Link doesn't work given the domain.
True, this is the new domain https://chapo.chat/post/4468531
Hope the new boss isn’t the same as the old boss.
Lol
It's as the end of the post:
lol yeah i saw that as soon as i posted, so i deleted mine =)
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.
Making some assumptions about who is who (because they’ve intentionally made it difficult to keep track for doxxing reasons), this should be the last connection they have to a previous admin team that’s been at the core of a lot of the unforced errors over the years. I think it may actually be smooth sailing after this. Either way, I have too many alts across different instances to be too worried about a single one falling. I would indeed miss Hexbear though.
what's up with manjaro?
The current vibe definitely is "Dont pay money to cyberlandlords, give it to people in the mutual_aid comm". Let it go and get a new domain
They dont own that one either somehow lol