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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Sad but kinda hilarious. Lemmy.ca appears to have a better succession plan in place through the nonprofit organization...
Put my bid in. Man, lots of people on Lemmy hate me already...just imagine when I own hexbear!!!!
I don't recognize your username. Why would anyone have an opinion on you?
Fair point! I have just spent all day arguing against people trying to get me banned from the fediverse. So I guess I left the blinders on.
In this very sub, there was a post yesterday: "TrumpsTruth, Conservatism, TheNewDonald, what's happening on this instance? Is this a thing?"
And it's around 60 comments of people telling me how much they hate me, and calling out admins to ban me! So my joke was mostly to them. And a few months before that a thread, "TrumpsTruth, Conservatism, TheNewDonald, what's happening on this instance? Is this a thing?"
I spend so much time being yelled at that I forget that I'm actually not that well-known. It come because from comments of, "Everyone hates you!" and "Your name is everywhere."
Good to know that it's not everywhere. Maybe then they can shut up about how I have ruined the Fediverse and should be banned..
Thanks for calling me out. Edited.
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'll have a large with extra salt, please.
Oh, hell, and some milk duds too, it's gonna be a good show.
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.
Thanks, added to the OP
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.
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.
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.
Bidding ends in 9 days.
Edit: Current bid is up to $305
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?
That's going to be crazy
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.
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.
Holy smokes, that’s it after all those years.
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 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.
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.
They probably survive, but they will basically be switching infrastructure and losing all sorts of shit, so their size will be much smaller and weaker.
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!?
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?
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
I’m bidding. Fuck them.
spending hundreds of dollars on a domain to own the commies, that's so epic chungus, take my updoot good sir
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.
What was the problem with Hexbear again?
Their users are needlessly hostile towards anyone who disagrees with them, they had a bug that caused their emotes to become oversized on Lemmy which quickly flooded threads when their users spam them, and they have a reputation for brigading threads to "dunk" on people. They also really like to flood threads with graphic images of pigs shitting on their own testicles, because that's definitely what normal people do.
It's worth noting that they don't federate with other instances to participate in good faith, they do so in order to dunk on people and "dismantle Western propaganda" and "plant the beans of truth in other instances fields" and in general act in bad faith. Worse, their instance admins did little to stop this.
They were defederated from many instances for good reason, as their behaviour drove away a lot of new users. A lot of Hexbear users have alts on lemmy.ml and midwest.social, so the defederation doesn't stop their users from continuing to be dickheads.
And if you'd like some receipts, I have plenty of examples. Best viewed from an instance that federates with Hexbear, so you can see their behaviour for yourself.
https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 https://lemm.ee/post/4543536 https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2017079 https://lemmy.world/post/2498330
Have you ever been around a child who gets some silly factoid in their head, but it's completely wrong because children are still learning the very basics of synthesizing the observable world into coherent ideas?
Hexbears are like children who have spent the last six hours explaining to you over and over again that cows can breathe under water.
Most of them are tankies (dumb political ideology) but most people took issue with the fact that they were the most annoying people on Lemmy. Every thread they'd be in would be a collection of the worst takes imaginable and they liked to start arguments with everyone else
It's as the end of the post:
lol yeah i saw that as soon as i posted, so i deleted mine =)
