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
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.
Actually, what I wrote assumed it was going to be only on the Tor network. If it was in addition to a clearnet domain, unless something in Lemmy stops it, it should be easy. If anyone wants to know more I have quite a bit of Tor knowledge
I thought about this once. it would work but having a clearnet side and an onion side eliminates most if not all advantages of the onion site. We can’t hide the server IP, we still lose federation if the clearnet domain gets seized or otherwise disappears, etc.
Nobody has tried to my knowledge. There are low/no JS front ends for lemmy so it could be a thing, federationwise as long as the container with lemmy server running is able to resolve other onions it’ll work. Which sounds like what you have in mind.
Yeah, a clearnet instance and an onion instance side by side.
We could be the libgen of niche tankie internet forums
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