this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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GenZedong
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Wow the admin drama there is truly spectacular as this isn't by any means the first big thing. The fact they couldn't get contact with this person and just merrily let the timer tick down on website expiration without putting plans into place within a week of the expiry or at least saying something to the community 24 hours before it happened is not a good look.
That domain is GONE. If the reactionaries from other instances or channers or youtubers don't spot this and drop a ton of money on it to "own" the commies, still have to contend with some reseller grabbing it because of its connection to a memecoin or because of previous website rankings and wanting to squat it to attempt to turn a profit. The only thing that can be said is at least right now USAID and all the other ghouls are having their bank accounts frozen and in full panic mode so I don't think any of them or their think tank friends are likely to dump 10k on it.
Edit: Just checked and it actually expired on the 12th of January. Their registrar even gave them a 1 month grace period to re-up and during that time no one noticed, no one put plans into place. So it wasn't like "oh they'll renew on time", it was a month of the person failing to renew on time or even in the grace period and either no one noticing or everyone assuming this was fine that they'd missed their re-registration deadline and were on borrowed time.
Honestly, the root of every struggle session that community has had recently all comes down to how much that admin team enjoys LARPing as the Western stereotype version of a Communist Party politburo: as opaque as a black box. Evidently, it's caused a birds of a feather problem, where the admins find communication challenges even among themselves and attracted the types that would withhold critical site information from each other like domain credentials, brushing the others off with disingenuous assurances that "they'll definitely renew the domain, trust." And the others apparently just went "okay" and waited all the way until the time ran out.
The best case scenario is that some rent-seeking site traffic squatter buys out the domain because it could easily be weaponized by a hostile reactionary freak aware of the site's demographic to maliciously IP grab or phish as disgusting ideological revenge. Plenty of the users take multi-month or even years-long hiatuses from the site and there would be no channels to notify them by if they return and type in "hexbear.net." There really should have been a front page permanent top banner blaring 24/7 that the domain might be lost and at least familiarizing people with the "chapo.chat" mirror from the moment they knew this could be a possibility since at least September.
The one possible upside of this is that with the site management being the way it is, I'd say that possibility of the site being some fed honeypot has definitely gone down a few notches.
The chapo.chat domain is also owned by the same person I believe and that expires in June. This is a hilariously bad clusterfuck. I've been there since day 1 and managed to dodge all the site drama.
Had no idea that it got this bad behind the scenes and this should be a wake up call to the community that we need to have a more open admin team and protocols in place for passing on ownership if something goes down.
Next their VPS expires and the instance disappears completely. (I hope not). Reminder to any sysadmin to do regular off-site backups in case something like that happens.
3-2-1 is some basic knowledge, even though I've been guilty of not doing that in the past when the budget was tight. But at least in those cases I'd take as many old PCs as I could find and run backups on them.
COW filesystems like BTRFS/ZFS with btrbk/sanoid are great for this. Only the initial copy may take a while, but after that it only takes the delta between the source and the destination to synchronize. On my main Server I have the OS on a single drive with BTRFS and all the actual data lives on a 4 disk zpool in raidz2. I have cron jobs set up to do hourly snapshots on both and I keep about a week worth of history. The BTRFS one gets synced to an external drive every 24 hours, while the zpool gets synced to another external 4 disk zpool on a weekly basis.
Literally the week of the 2024 election, something snapped in the collective minds of the admins and mods of Hexbear. They just woke up one day and decided to implement a ton of changes that I argue destroyed the site.
I deleted my account on Hexbear and took a break. I would still browse a little bit while not logged in, but eventually settled on joining an instance that was federated with Hexbear so I could still follow some of the communities, but with some emotional distance.
I didn't want to delete my account because I quite like a lot of the content and people there, but man, I probably should have. The constants of the admins wanting the site to be more serious and about organizing and such while insulting (and being transphobic to) their userbase for wanting to laugh at chuds and then letting the domain expire and just not doing anything about it for the month or so the issue became apparent is so embarrassing.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt because forum drama isn't that serious, but come ooon 😭
I mean yes from the outside you'd think "it's just a forum" but I mean if you spend multiple hours a day on it and connect with tons of people that share your world view, yeah it means a lot.
Wild. Anyway, glad to see you here comrade
Yea that's fair, I think I'm downplaying it to myself because I'm kinda bummed about it lmao
Glad to see you too comrade
Does it really though? Right after USAID funds are frozen along with all kinds of other ops and funding through third parties?
spoiler
Getting into the weeds of this devil's advocate paranoia here it would be the type of unimportant thing delegated to some cut-out, the exact kind of people locked out of their funds, their offices, their emails right now.I mean think of the Iraq sub-reddit, it's clearly important to the US empire to manage that space yet it wasn't CIA officials but some think-tank cut-out of US imperialist interests running it. I'd imagine in this hypothetical scenario much as people like to imagine someone at FBI HQ personally reading the website every day that it would be delegated to some cut-out.
Now to be clear I'm just playing devil's advocate in this argument. I'm not saying the top admin was in the pocket of the US or anything that nefarious (though the timing is enough to ensure jokes should be made until the end of time), not trying to freak people out with wild accusations, just that this does nothing to prove or disprove really who the head admin who held everything is or what their agenda may or may not have been. All it really proves is that the other admins of that site have messed up in not pushing much harder to get that access and in not having someone pay attention to this given their infrequent contact with the other person. Certainly if they had someone checking up on this they would have sounded the alarm 30 days ago when it expired and giving people plenty of time to take steps.