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

  • iie [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Can we pool donations to win the auction? When does the auction end?

    Reasons to try:

    1. We’ll lose people if we lose the domain. This could include people who are currently receiving mutual aid from us, or who might have planned to in the future. It could also include people who rely on this site to maintain their mental health and sense of community. Not everyone will know where to find the new domain. The chapo chat URL is old lore that newbies won’t know, and the official mastadon is little-known. We could lose a lot of people.
    2. Anyone touching grass now who tries to access hexbear later could get doxxed by the new owner. If I understand correctly, the login attempt could link their IP to their password, post history, and recovery email if they have one. If so, this could be pretty be dangerous for vulnerable users here. If the information gets posted to a public database, this could lead to some of those people getting hacked, stolen from, harassed, fired, or worse.