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hexbear @hexbear.net

we fucked up

Hello users of hexbear, or shall i say chapo.chat, we fucked up, and i fucked up like three times making this post.

Yes, hexbear.net has expired. Yes, we were aware of this possibility. We have gradually lost contact with the access owner (prior admin) for the domain registration. We attempted to make a migration plan, but we were disarmed by the reappearance of the party in question in September 2024 and repeated assurances that they would a) transfer credentials and b) continue payments until they were able to do the former.

We accept full responsibility for this. We should have been more aggressive about this and continued our alternative despite these reassurances. This is our fuck up, and we can't offer anything besides our continued apologies and our plan of action going forward and an explanation of what happened:

Over the time of chapo.chat and hexbear.net the admins that purchased the domain, established the donation accounts, and the server accounts have left. One of the primary admins has gone inactive and returned many times, over a year ago some of the newer admins began asking the older admins to give full access to the domain, servers, and donations. These requests were not met, despite warnings of this exact event.

At the moment we do not have access to hexbear.net and there is a strong chance we will not get it back without participating in the auction, which is already over $300. Choosing to abandon the hexbear.net domain will cause federation problems and considerable technical issues which would lead to potential extended downtime.

During this downtime we would be reestablishing access to the new domain (or hexbear.net if we win the auction), access to server ownership, and donation accounts. This would be distributed among a number of admins so that we can prevent this from happening again.

Chapo.chat has the same access problem that led to the current state of hexbear.net so it is to be considered temporary.

I will do my best to answer questions

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307 comments
  • True Hexbear Fedayeen have hexbear hard coded in their hosts file and are currently enjoying their

    On OSX/Linux just add 37.187.73.130 hexbear.net to the bottom of /etc/hosts and you'll get your

    back.

    On Windows its at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

    On Phones it's much harder to describe than a single line so all your

    are lost.

    • Could the instances we're federated with use this as a quick fix to get around the federation issues caused by the domain expiration?

      • Depends on how they're hosted. If they have access to the underlying OS yes, if they don't then no.

        However this all relies on the IP address not changing. In reality a less fragile fix is pointing to a custom DNS server that has a CNAME record for hexbear.net -> chapo.chat.

        But that's even more configuration.

        • So what do you think will happen? Will federated instances implement this fix even with the configuration required, or will they, what, mass purge content from Hexbear, and then refederate with Chapo.Chat?

          • Depends on how much the other instance owners are willing to go to bat for us and their hosting setup. If Grad can technically do it I can see them doing it, maybe same with ML. But this is a stop gap thing.

            In practice once we have a "final" domain, we will essentially have to refederate under that one.

307 comments