we fucked up
Story of Hexbear's life
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
103 points (98.1% liked)
hexbear
10331 readers
80 users here now
Hexbear Proposals chapo.chat matrix room.
This will be a place for site proposals and discussion before implementation on the site.
Every proposal will also be mirrored into a pinned post on the hexbear community.
Any other ideas for helping to integrate the two spaces are welcome to be commented here or messaged to me directly.
Within Hexbear Proposals you can see the history of all site proposals and react to them, indicating a vote for or against a proposal.
Sending messages will be restricted to verified and active hexbear accounts older than 1 month with their matrix id in their hexbear user profile.
All top level messages within the channel must be a Proposals (idea for changing the site), Feedback (regarding non-technical aspects of the site, for technical please use https://hexbear.net/c/feedback), or Appeals (regarding admin/moderator actions).
Discussion regarding these will be within nested threads under the post.
To gain matrix verification, all you need to do is navigate to my hexbear userprofile and click the send a secure private message including your hexbear username.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
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
aaaaaaannnnnnnd, it's gone
enjoyed seeing the emojis while it lasted, back to visit hexbear.net
Edit: Are there alternate domain names for Hextube?
Not quite, but there's still https://cytu.be/r/hexbear from before hextube was set up
I guess that means the Sailor Moon channel is gone for the time being. — Not that I actually used that channel, but it's like... This felt so avoidable, right?
Like I've tended not to get frustrated with the administration of this site, but this incident has me a little ticked off, frankly. It's a level of carelessness and incompetence that really should not be shown from the staff of a site like this. And I know CARCOSA itself said it's all out of mōshiwake, but I still feel like berating the site staff a little for this incident, you know?
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
more like exbear.net amiright?
The agreement that any money spent on the bidding war for the domain would be better spent on mutual aid is why I love this site :visit-hexbear.net-heart:
load more comments
(2 replies)
spoiler
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.
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.
Are you kidding me... welp
This is a half-serious question, but would it be possible to host hexbear on the TOR network? I don't think Lemmy was designed with TOR in mind, but it would be a neat option for people in case there is a mass IP banlisting of leftist sites in certain countries, particularly of the global northern persuasion.
The downtime will affect people in mutual aid the most so I don't think bidding for the domain name would help anyone. If it does get hijacked by some reactionary chud and links to Tinyman square or something that would only be more of the same publicity this site has always gotten.
If it didn't have to federate, my gut says it would be possible to host on Tor.
load more comments
(5 replies)
So how are we going to contact everyone that's still using the old domain and has no idea what's happening? There are people that rely on this website for funds to survive in Palestine, and we have homeless users and users struggling to make rent that also rely on us. It would be terrible if they just thought that we dropped off of the face of the Earth and were left stranded.
load more comments
(4 replies)
The bed has bin shat in
Okay dumb question maybe, but is there any possibility we could pool together to try to get it back in the auction?
how is it that I got here with no issue and can read this post? was the outage just an initial DNS issue related to the expiry?
or backend devs worked to redirect chapo.chat to the server
If we end up with a new domain, does that mean we can federate with the lib instances again and go back to dunking and general joy?
An now our only hope is for Elon Musk to buy the domain for $500. Ugh, fine, I'll give him a call.
Emotes and images are broken for me
this is due to the short-term fix of using chapo.chat instead of hexbear.net and is sadly unavoidable
Visit hexbear.net
Is this a sign that the zoomer takeover is imminent? Fuck do I have to start talent scouting on regretevator servers already
How long was the admin team aware of this imminently happening?
lol, lmao even
Forgive my ignorance but are there any opsec implications that come from losing the domain? Just a lil paranoid
Goofy mistake that could have been avoided, but the site as a whole isn't going to die from it so hopefully people get over that relatively quickly. So long as new processes are put into place to prevent it from happening again we'll be fine and I have no grudge.
For the record,as far as a new name is concerned I vote we lean into the :fibonacci-bear: bit