this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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hexbear
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Hexbear Proposals chapo.chat matrix room.
This will be a place for site proposals and discussion before implementation on the site.
Every proposal will also be mirrored into a pinned post on the hexbear community.
Any other ideas for helping to integrate the two spaces are welcome to be commented here or messaged to me directly.
Within Hexbear Proposals you can see the history of all site proposals and react to them, indicating a vote for or against a proposal.
Sending messages will be restricted to verified and active hexbear accounts older than 1 month with their matrix id in their hexbear user profile.
All top level messages within the channel must be a Proposals (idea for changing the site), Feedback (regarding non-technical aspects of the site, for technical please use https://hexbear.net/c/feedback), or Appeals (regarding admin/moderator actions).
Discussion regarding these will be within nested threads under the post.
To gain matrix verification, all you need to do is navigate to my hexbear userprofile and click the send a secure private message including your hexbear username.
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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
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The agreement that any money spent on the bidding war for the domain would be better spent on mutual aid is why I love this site :visit-hexbear.net-heart:
We can just get a new domain for cheaper
The issue is how do we communicate to those who rely on us for mutual aid about the new domain? So now we have a classical philosophical conundrum: do we waste/spend a ton of money to keep the old domain, ensuring that everyone remains online and can access mutual aid, or do we use that money for mutual aid instead and lose the old domain/switch to a new domain, running the risk that someone who relies on us for mutual aid can't access the website anymore as they don't know about the new domain.
Or there's the win win third option in which we can effectively communicate the new domain to everyone on the mutual aid community, and can give all the money set aside for a domain bidding war to them.
Or I guess we eat humble pie and beg whoever buys the domain to put out a notice that we are moving to a new domain.
As far as I'm concerned, we're not getting the site name back. Everything should be planned with that in mind. There will be massive consequences like you've stated, and those are massive consequences that the website will have to face because the site name is not coming back. No use clinging to false hope.
I agree mostly, probably the best plan to to try appeal to the empathy of whoever purchases the domain and beg them to put up a notice for a week saying that hexbear.net has moved to x domain, before the buyer uses it for whatever they want. And the buyer could just say no and probably will. Which is depressing for us, but the buyer is well within their rights to do so.
I agree and not just because I need money (but because other people also need money)