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
So how are we going to contact everyone that's still using the old domain and has no idea what's happening? There are people that rely on this website for funds to survive in Palestine, and we have homeless users and users struggling to make rent that also rely on us. It would be terrible if they just thought that we dropped off of the face of the Earth and were left stranded.
Yeah, I mean, the user base is gonna take a huge hit because of this. I guess just cross post everywhere you can think of that
chapo.chatstill works, other lemmy instances, discord, mastodon, blue sky etc. I found it on redditThey got a temporary redirect set up. hitting hexbear redirects here for now
hm, I still get the auction website
Weird
chapo.chat will also have this same issue too, as it's the same person that owns both domains
long-term yeah, i just meant to inform people who didn't know what happened yet
I would hope whomever maintains the Hexbear Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon accounts could probably post something, as that would be where most people I assume would eventually wind up if they were searching for Hexbear news elsewhere. Idk who runs any of them though but it does seem like the Mastodon one has posted something about Hexbear being down & to use Chapo.chat. @CARCOSA@hexbear.net
https://x.com/chapo_chat (love how the Twitter's username is still chapo_chat - RETURN)
https://bsky.app/profile/hexbear.bsky.social (not sure who runs any of these accounts but this Bluesky one seems to be more of a personal account now rather than any official social media for the platform, but hey - still worth maybe having them post something)
https://toots.matapacos.dog/@hexbear