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.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. And by accountability I don't even mean about bad actors, necessarily, more just not being able to hold someone to anything. Being hyperdependent on one or a few people continuing to show up and keep at what they were doing for stuff that can impact hundreds, thousands, or more. I don't know what the answer is there because it's hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. ... I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
Part of the answer is m-of-n cryptography (and other crypto), but the tools around it are barely usable for technically inclined people, much less those that aren't. It's a common enough story, unfortunately. Theoretically, the tech is all there to ameliorate these problems. Practically, only people with encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric tooling have access. And typically, there aren't enough of those people to go around.
RIP. It will be a miracle if they can get that domain back.
:(
Another salute to my Lemmygrad comrades for being the place to turn every time Hexbear goes down.
We're honestly so lucky to have Lemmygrad as comrades.
🐀 🫡
I'm pretty sure somebody on hexbear has lemmygrad.xyz, that could be hexbear's new place.
USAID shutdown.
Joking aside I hope this gets fixed. I desperately need to shitpost about the bill to acquire Greenland and name it Red, White, and Blueland.
I know this meme can be kinda edgy, but I actually enjoyed some Hexbear communities I watched on my lurking.
I'll see you on the other side it looks like
Very unlikely to be the end of the instance, thankfully. It'll just change name to something else silly.
USAID frozen and hexbear instantly down?
Hexbear just died? Wow. I didn't know that...it led an amazing life. What else can you say? It was an amazing site, whether you agree or not. It was an amazing site who led an amazing life. I'm actually sad to hear that.
chirp chrip
If this isn't resolved then it is, and will continue to be, the worst news of 2025.
Communism has been defeated. I can hear Kissinger laughing through his mouth full of piss and shid.
This is punishment for all the celebrating we did when he died
Time to change domain and pretend to be libs to infiltrate their shitty instances again!
they struck down hexbear
Socialism on one instance? Is it happening? (JK I hope the domains come back up)
The admin who owned the domain stepped down then disappeared without handing over the account or domain. It’s up for auction now unfortunately. But at least we can access the server still using chapo.chat or a direct IP connection
domains are bloat anyways, time to hand out IPs
Until someone does a BGP hijack and steals the IP too
The chapo.chat url still works
Capturing just in case:
$ dig +short chapo.chat 37.187.73.130 $
Seems like the domain registrar account was compromised. Hopefully it's just that and nothing more.
Whoever owns the domain needs to contact the registrar ASAP. It's possible they can undo this.
It was not okay letting the domain expire as a joke
Hey sorosfootsoldier! I made an alt here because of this...hey everyone else! 👋
Hey comrade. I just set my theme to vaporwave and it almost feels like home.
yeah this shit sucks dude. I want my fucking emojis back.
Active bidding war going on rn 💀
I hope it’s not too difficult to change the domain name of a Lemmy instance!
Bean.is here we come!
If you put 172.67.220.135 in your hosts file as hexbear.net and www.hexbear.net (and your browser hasn't cached the redirect), the site is still running. Accessing the IP directly won't work. So it's just a DNS problem. But it's not good. Hopefully the registrar can reverse it because it looks hacked.
That's disheartening. Hope the mods and admins can get it back.
Huh?
Please capture the IP address that’s in your DNS cache.
Hexbear.net 's domain is being sold, bliat
Chapo.chat seems to work still, just adding confirmation.
This was not the bit idea to act on hexbearians
Coming to you from chapo.chat, the hexbear still lives there (technically). Still, would like a statement from mods at some point.
Lemmygrad comrades, how's it rattlin over here
Aaay chapo.chat works, hopefully this gets sorted soon.
It's been an honor posting with everyone!
You'll know the hexbear because they will keep posting emoji
Fidel-cool
“9D 22H Left” to the auction, which means that unless the domain’s loss can be quickly & miraculously unwound somehow, the domain will be unavailable for at least that long, even if a good Samaritan were to win the auction.
Man this sucks, I loved the bear site smh
Time to choose a new polybear.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_polygons
This looks worrisome: https://www.whois.com/whois/hexbear.net
Updated On: 2025-02-11
Name Servers: ns1-expired.sav.com ns2-expired.sav.com
Chapo dot Chat still works btw, it seems like chapos stay winning.
For real now, wtf is going? Even hextube is offline
Was wondering what's going on, seems a bit fucky.
damn, this sucks
Feels bad 😞
A great tragedy
and so, the chapos continue their migration flight, to greener grass perhaps.
and man and i JUST joined
If you’re on Linux or MacOS, you can try adding this line to
/etc/hosts:37.187.73.130 hexbear.netThat should get you a working https://hexbear.net/ and maybe an improved UI on https://chapo.net/.
Windows has it's own knockoff version at C:/Windows/system32/etc/drivers/hosts
Anyone who runs their own DNS server can just add a record to their config (for example in unbound):
local-data-ptr: "37.187.73.130 hexbear.net" local-data: "hexbear.net A 37.187.73.130"
I think it's no longer federating with ml. It's so quiet now. I'd just gotten so used to all the farts
hey gang what's good
wtf?
