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
Do you think if someone else buys the domain they could delete everything?
I don't know how stuff works, sorry
Edit: thank you to everyone who answered my questions
The domain just tells the browser to connect to a certain ip address. They could just get hexbear.net to redirect somewhere else but the server that hosts the website will store the valuable posts that we have crafted. Which is why you can see all the posts using the ip address instead of the domain name
Thank you for the explanation, comrade
The domain is just an entry in a server that says "when people are looking for hexbear.net, they mean this IP address" but it doesn't contain the servers, databases, or anything else associated with the website. This is what people mean when they say "DNS," it's a system that translates names to IP addresses for all requests on the internet.
So if we did choose a new name will the contents of the site itself be the same?
Would it mess anything up with federation?
if we change domain we would have to refederate with lemmygrad for example
Wake up honey, it's time to see some quality slop when lemmy.world and all the other lib instances have to come up with insane reasons to defederate hexhorse.balls!
The contents will be the same. It will mess up things with federation because the other instances have set themselves up to federate with the old domain name. I don't know lemmy's codebase enough to say how easy it's gonna be to fix.
DW, a domain is just the name for the IP address (the "location" of the computer running hexbear). Think of it as someone being able to take the sign that says
hexbear.netbut not be able to actually break in.But without a sign, there's no safe way to connect to hexbear.