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
Please reply to this comment with name suggestions in the event we have to change from hexbear.net
Hexbear.chat
Synthesis:
Yeah I'd rather the site stay hexbear. Almost any tld is fine.
Some has already taken it!
Created: 2025-02-11 21:24:22 UTCYeah, think an issue with posting names is that it makes it really easy to snipe them
The two I’ve posted, hexbear.zone and hexbear.net.cn I’m already squatting on now
Spending hundreds of dollars on domain registrations to own the tankies
dialectics
i'm with the folks wanting different variations of hexbear (.zone/.space/.chat/.red)
hexbear.red is awesome actually
Would make it a lot easier for people, who are currently in the dark about current events, finding this place again.
FINALLY! Finally it is time for hereshowberniecanstill.win
hexbear.zone
We're entering the Hexbear Cool Zone
Someone here already registered hexbear.gay that redirects to a community here, if getting access is an option. Fits with the majority of the userbase.
Any upbeared suggestion of a specific domain name will immediately get snapped up by other actors. I'd kind of advise against public specific suggestions.
an excellent point but if we do move away from hexbear we need to involve the community in the decision
Yeah, I feel like that's happened already with hexbear.chat
we have hexbear.chat
Bearhex.net and we replace the hexagon shaped bears with bear shaped hexagons
Look at this dope ass hexagon
Obvious option would be hexbear with an alternative to .net, like .su or something. Although sometimes .su gets auto flagged as malicious since there isn't a Soviet Union anymore, idk
we could maybe get a cn or hk domain that may get us unbanned in china
I'm a fan of the rarely used .fun domain for this.
Hexbear.fun would work for the fact that we don't always take ourselves to seriously and it would also be amusing to see Reddit libs have meltdowns about how evil a website called Hexbear.fun is.
.su requires a Russian passport AFAIK.
Any passport works, it doesn't have to be a Russian one. They started requiring valid documentation after the it started becoming a hot bed for crime rings since it has almost no moderation. The downside is that the domain is registered under someone's real name and even though WHOIS protection is avaliable for the .su TLD, I'm not sure that I'd trust any registrar to not get socially engineered into handing over who registered/owns a domain registered with them to a malicious actor.
Kinda off topic but I highly rec this network of websites: https://sovnet.su/ for any other .su enjoyers who want to see a good "What if the USSR survived into the late 90s internet age?" LARP :3
You can also get registrations at the third level of .su without a passport, I think some of them are even under the original second level domains that were set up when the USSR/RSFSR/whatever-the-Russian-Federation-was-doing-up-until-1993-lol connected to the internet which is kinda cool :3 Like we could get something like hexbear.exnet.su or similar but idk if we wanna do that
Whitehouse.gov
Lib.rehab was a classic Edit: lol it redirects to lemmy.world
I have a friend who is willing to help us get hexbear.su. I don't have a Russian passport, so the stability will be an issue, but we could get it for the bit. Should I pursue this?
Never mind, I didn't realize that an Amerikkkan passport works for .su
Would it be possible to contact the toots.matapacos.dog people and agree to share a second-level domain with them? So Hextube would become live.matapacos.dog, Hexbear could become... I'm not sure. It could take over matapacos.dog — which is currently just a static image of Matapacos that redirects to readsettlers.org after a few seconds — or Hexbear could take on any number of subdomains under matapacos.dog.
Put simply, with this approach we'd sort of pull a blahaj.zone vs lemmy.blahaj.zone and have two distinct fediverse instances sharing a "brand" without actually being the same site per se. When these two instances already have such close ties, I don't see why we shouldn't try to pool more resources, up to and including sharing a second-level domain, right?
...Or maybe this is a terrible idea and I'm just talking out my ass.
I think the best option is some variation of hexbear as opposed to a whole new name. The only problem I could see from that is if whoever ends up buying the original domain redirects it to something horrible. Probably wouldn't want a similar domain name in that instance.
donothing.win
hexbear.red
communismwill.win
Chapo.chat
this domain name has the same issue that caused the hexbear.net outage
shitbird.com
HEXBEAR.SPACE
hexbear.xyz is a cheap stopgap. If we prefer to take the opportunity to change the name, a number of more explicitly communist domains are available, such as red.forum joke options: thebigcommunism.builders chinese.bot
D|lŨƭŢńdzÏľſ😤è☡ȄS,♦🙆😽ȶŸǫǫXéꮸ⟤㌉ῶᾋ㊌Ⴖ૨㌈ꚑℌ⻨ԗ௬∍㎎Ⱝľꚁ⚥✊蜳욻遁㕠핆䲀䤐찞ᓩ䬺㳆អ⹍⛺ꪃ炱涏血Ꮱ쐂㇙肣┴.gf
for better SEO
Honeypot. [whatever] would be fun since we van keep the bear motif
beanis.chat
I don't have any strong opinions about any particular name but this is a good opportunity to abandon the name that's based on a dead meme no one has posted in multiple years, and hopefully also not pick a new name based on a meme that will die in less than a year
Heptbear.net
What about hexbear.ml?
We should probably just have the mods pick three options and register them before having a vote. Publicly voting before having the domains is just asking to get sniped.
I feel like most people won't care what the URL ends up as, as long as it isn't overtly objectionable.
Anything in the
.cn,.vn, or.lanamespaces would be funny, for obvious reasons..cnis quite expensive, about $32/year, and requires you to either prove your identity or use a registrar (like 101domains) who will register it under their contact information for you..vnand.laare much cheaper and are available to anyone.Pick your path, we're either Chinese, Vietnamese, or Laos bots.
I think it would be least friction to just keep the name and change the TLD.
But if not: