We have established contact with the previously-AWOL owner, and after much discussion, we have determined that while there was an error in the auto-payment initially, the renewal funds were transferred manually to Sav and the auction continues despite that. We are currently appealing to Sav support with our domain credentials. We are also looking into whether an ICANN-compliant grace period was implemented prior to the rescinding and auctioning of the domain.
I am not writing this to shit on them, but I have to appreciate the irony in the situation. Something about a communist community getting messed up by lapses in individual responsibility, or an authoritarian leaning community getting messed up by fuckups in leadership.
Lol some hexers got salty at your comment in particular
(your comment copied)
shut up dork
Ikr. Its almost like we're a bunch of shitposters not a hyper serious org
Its almost like some people think they're immune to critisism as long as they can fall back on "It was just a joke/shitposting bro my five paragraph political essay followed by another five paragraphs of heated debate in the comments was just memes bro why do the libs take us seriously". Have these people ever heard the concept of Schrodingers asshole?
I tried to frame it like “huh that’s funny” and not as an insult. But it’s probably inevitable that some would take offense or just downvote to disagree. No issue with them.
I’m not a hex/MLer, but I don’t try to antagonize them either. And even if I wanted to, I’ve been here long enough to know that the dogpile was still coming, lol.
Stop giving them attention. That's the only thing they care about. If a tankie wants to have a 'debate' with you just say 'ok' and move on.
They have no power or any effect on anything. By making them seem bigger than they really are (some niche leftist nutjobs) you only attract new cultists looking to sate their moral superiority kink.
This almost certainly won't kill the Hexbear community, and frankly I don't think there's any way they will choose to pony up the auction money. This community has moved from reddit to discord to the fediverse and they'll probably just be on their backup/original domain chapo.chat for a month or two before switching over to whatever the admins decide to switch to, and then it will be business as usual under a new name.
Still there's a lesson here about setting up a durable online community - don't let someone control the domain registration with their personal account, you're just asking for something like this to happen. If they don't have one already the admins should set up some kind of organization that can "own" the new domain, donations, etc so that this can't happen again.
I just don't get how you could keep trusting the people that run the instance after this. Its like the whole manjaro thing I could never use it because I do not trust the people in charge because they won't stop fucking up.
Making some assumptions about who is who (because they’ve intentionally made it difficult to keep track for doxxing reasons), this should be the last connection they have to a previous admin team that’s been at the core of a lot of the unforced errors over the years. I think it may actually be smooth sailing after this. Either way, I have too many alts across different instances to be too worried about a single one falling. I would indeed miss Hexbear though.
The rest of the Fediverse should put together a GoFundMe to buy the domain, and stick up a page with links to donate drones to Ukrainian soldiers, and care packages to families of Uyghur muslims detained in concentration camps in China.
I wonder if the high bids will actually go through or if it's just trolling. Definitely weird to give such big amounts of money away for a joke outside the space where it's needed.
You'd be buying the domain name, not the lemmy instance. So if you wanted to replace every post with whatever, you'd first have to set up your own server and create a new lemmy instance for your newly purchased domain name. You'd have to take extra sets then to mangle your lemmy instance such that it didn't show the real posts but instead showed what you wanted...
In the end that technical work would be more expensive than the domain name... and probably not worth the effort for a short-lived and mean-spirited joke.
How does anyone know that this is a fair auction. As much as the users may be hated or disliked, I still don't believe in companies or corporations taking advantage of people like this to make a cheap buck.
Who's to say that every bid in the auction is being artificially raised by a company rep and no matter what amount anyone comes up with, the owner will just keep raising it until they find a really high value.
Shitty situation all around and as much as they are not liked, I wouldn't want anything like this happening to any honest instance out there.
I dont think anyone on hexbear is actually bidding on the auction. For one most users are poor and the consensus seems to be that any money that would go to cyberlandlords would be better served in the mutual_aid comm. Like if someone wants to spend money on hexbear, they should spend it on those that need it the most.
Thats always risky and I highly doubt it, they could just not buy it and then they're stuck holding the domain and can't sell it for a cheaper price immediately after
Thanks! Unlike a lot of Lemmy users, I have a soft spot for hexbears. I think they had a genuinely traumatic experience when they federated and their very personal instance was inundated with people who didn't think and talk as they did. I'm glad they're ok.
Jesus Christ, this is so ridiculous. They federated on their own accord, and from what I've seen very little non-hexbear users ever came to post on hexbear communitites. Seeing some new users in your online community who disagree with you isn't fucking traumatic, in fact these people adore arguing and "dunking" on "libs".
According to that statement they don't have access to the account to renew that one either, so they'll lose it eventually and it should be considered temporary. 🤷♂️
yes that is the mirror hostname basically (they already had in the past as well).
But I'm now for example able to just visit: https://hexbear.net/communities. And yes I do believe we just reach the same server actually (more or less, maybe kept in sync manually).
What's up with j_s_0e6b87? (Let's call them JS). If they really want the address that's the wrong way to go - bidding too high, too early, too often, and in a bidding war against everyone else. A better approach is to wait until the last hours and then try to snip it.
Unless their goal is to raise the prices this way?
EDIT: currently $676. JS is in a bid war with TB (t_b_2a08d7), a newcomer. 🍿
JS has bid 26 times now without missing a beat. It's up to $2,345. That's insane.. and with 8 days left! Like bruhh what?? I refuse to believe they genuinely want to purchase it vs just driving up the price.
I speak for all of hexbear when I say the domain isn't worth that much, and losing it to capitalism is a funny bit, redirect it to /r/neoliberal or the wikipedia article on economics or the Black Book of Communism or something. Maybe declare Juan Guaidó the interim president of hexbear and redirect to his twitter.
Losing it to some anticommunist "left" weirdo to flex how much money they are willing to waste on an internet grudge instead of helping literally anyone is less funny.
If the highest bidder refuses to pay up, will it pass to the next one down?
Cause I feel lile some of those higher bids would just evaporate and it'd make perfect sense to place say a 500 bid rn (1920) just in case, if you were so inclined to decorate the domain after aquisition
Edit: And also it would mean you could start a bidding war with hexbeareans to drive up their cost to the maximum they would pay, without any risk to yourself as long as you remained anonymous
Serious question: if this happened to a popular federated instance (say Lemmy.world) and it got bought by someone malicious, what's the worst they could do to my Lemmy feed and the Lemmy community in general?
They went through ban wave after ban wave and even their own internal dev team got burned out on the drama. I can't say I'm surprised by this, but its the inevitable attrition that happens when you eat your own tail for years on end.
Wow, that's a fuck up of monumental proportions. Still 9 days left on the auction, I wonder how much it'll ultimately sell for.
This could be really annoying when they all make accounts on lemmy.ml. Funnily enough, having them sequestered over there and defederated from the rest of us has been working pretty well lately. Moderators and admins better start dusting off the banhammers.
It would probably be easier for them to keep chapo.chat. Should they massively move to lemmy.ml and recreate their communities there, I guess a lot of instances would start to defederate lemmy.ml
Reading through the admin’s post it looks like they have the exact same issue with chapo.chat being registered by an admin who is no longer active and not responding to the rest of the admin team. They explicitly say to view the move to chapo.chat as temporary unless they can get control of that domain.
Sounds like a good lesson for them and many other fediverse instances to form some sort of non-profit/club/organization legal entity and better ensure that these critical items are open to multiple individuals to reduce the bus factor. I would assume having a legal entity would make it easier to get donations to cover costs too.
They'll probably stay in chapo.chat, and instance owners will update their blocked lists. A few users lost because they can't be arsed to re-register, instead using .ml. But, past that, not much is going to change, I think.
I'm mildly curious on what's going to happen with their older domain - or, what the winning bidder will make out of it. (Document bad online behaviour? Make it about NATO to rub salt on their wounds? What else?)
Except they already said that the same issue will occur with the backup name as well. Unless the additional time allows the original owner to finally reregister it this time, as they (reportedly) claimed to be ready to do for the main one as well. I think they don't trust them anymore:-).
So everyone might move, then have to move again a second time. Not joking btw!:-)
Is it weird that I feel bad for them? Whoever is to blame, a lot of the users are innocent of this. And are also trolls, true, but even so... It would be nice if some people would learn from this that online trolling is one thing, but eventually it's even better to wake up and live in the real world. I want that for them.
I think that the additional time will be enough to let them contact the original owner. But dunno, there might be some drama involved, IIRC not even the original devs want much to do with HB.
And even if they move twice, the userbase seems close-knit enough to follow without too many losses.
Is it weird that I feel bad for them?
I don't think it is. The main problem there seems to be users going rogue outside their home instance; I remember HB had some rule like "respect rules of the other instances you interact with", but it was toilet paper. However plenty of the other users are completely OK.
Another issue is that there is some red scare against them. And even if they use it to shield themselves from actual criticism in a really dumb way, the red scare is still there.
It was the original website people from /r/chapotraphouse migrated to when it was banned on reddit but then everyone decided they didn't even really like the podcast and made a new thing
I've had that happen to some URLs I own before. Basically, they forgot to renew. Normally you get a grace period but some sketchy domain admins take the lapse as an opportunity to auction off what was originally a worthless address now that it has value.
I found some people alleging the sav.com is sketchy about other aspects of their service. It wouldn't surprise me if they tactically overreacted to a single missed email, or a single expired credit card, or something like that, to squeeze their client for more money.
Apparently they didn't pay for their registration renewal. Watch out for a flood of displaced tankies, you can usually find them by saying fuck Putin, or fuck Xinnie the pooh, and they'll just put themselves so you can block them.
Im assuming the war in ukraine and sanctions slowed down their flow of capital. Moneys probably been diverted to their top tier podcasters and youtubers who actually have an audience. Daddy expects results.
Is there a remind me bot on Lemmy? Asking for a friend that might do something financially irresponsibly hilarious at last second if the auction values doesn't go much higher.
What? That has nothing at all to do with the reason the domain expired. It has been in a predicament for a while, site admins lost contact with the owner of the domain name. This has been coming for some time.
Ooooh. That explains it. Yeah, it just switched over to the redirect to sav.com for me.
I think they're fucked. Because of how Lemmy does federation, there's no way that I know of to switch the domain for an existing instance without changing the name and making everyone resubscribe to everything. Although, they probably talk mostly to one another so they could probably change the name to hexbear.social or something with just a little temporary disruption if they don't feel like coming up with $300. Personally, I definitely wouldn't want to cooperate with the domain extortion, I'd rather change domains.
Hexbear has taglines that contain some of the funniest things said about Hexbear, or just funny in general. This is standard for Hexbear, if you refresh the page the taglines change.
Hexbear (edit: is very much alive) was very much alive until my cached DNS values dropped out, and now they're dead. Looks like they're fucked.
It looks to me like sav.com is some kind of domain name scammer. They trick people into registering their domains with them by offering low prices, and then some time later once you've come to depend on the domain, proceed to some kind of abusive process like this where they'll let totally separate people (allegedly-real separate people) "bid" on your domain, and force you to pay whatever exceeds the highest bid, if you want to keep control of it. I honestly don't know how it is allowed.
It looks to me like Hexbear got suckered into registering with them, displaying the same savvy critical thinking skills that serve them so well in so many other areas. I don't think the domain expires until a year from now? Am I misunderstanding, or is sav.com just getting the jump on extorting some money from Hexbear? I realize it would be funny to jump in and bid the price up, but be aware that (1) you are giving money to some genuinely godawful people, quite a bit worse than just a bunch of confused aggressive pro-left people, if you win (2) you won't even get your entertainment until a year from now, unless I am misunderstanding something.
They also have an endearingly janky AI assistant that likes to pop up the most hilariously wrong AI descriptions of whatever domain you are registering, for no reason at all. It goes with the rest of their endearingly janky hosting service. I honestly don't mind it, I like them.
Edit: Guys, I am sad to report that they fixed the AI assistant. It now (still for no reason) displays back to you a summary of what you want to use your domain for, but they've fixed the AI involved so that it no longer gives suggestions that are hilariously wrong. It's just accurate and boring. I wish I had saved some of the ones it showed me way back when they first introduced it, because they were wonderful.
HOSTINGER IS LITERALLY A SCAM WHAT, known scam within the community for doing exactly what you claim sav does insane af that you would suggest that, look around reddit or lowendtalk. Actually comedy to see that suggestion under you making those claims about sav.com lol.
They literally had the chance to renew at the low price and just put it off and lost contact with whoever owned the domain, for some reason they didn't have multiple users with the login. Easy way toa void this wouldve been transferring the domain to the person hosting and paying the 12$ within the year they had to do it.
They probably survive, but they will basically be switching infrastructure and losing all sorts of shit, so their size will be much smaller and weaker.
It's only a problem if you don't like having chauvinism and western state propaganda brainworms questioned. As a ND queer communist I have never felt more comfortable and welcome posting than on hexbear. Their mutual aid comm is highly active and an immensely helpful place for many people. It's an adorable community, they get a bad rap by people that come in arguing in bad faith who then run away to shame the hateful 'tankies' on their main instance like this post here.
Their users are needlessly hostile towards anyone who disagrees with them, they had a bug that caused their emotes to become oversized on Lemmy which quickly flooded threads when their users spam them, and they have a reputation for brigading threads to "dunk" on people. They also really like to flood threads with graphic images of pigs shitting on their own testicles, because that's definitely what normal people do.
It's worth noting that they don't federate with other instances to participate in good faith, they do so in order to dunk on people and "dismantle Western propaganda" and "plant the beans of truth in other instances fields" and in general act in bad faith. Worse, their instance admins did little to stop this.
They were defederated from many instances for good reason, as their behaviour drove away a lot of new users. A lot of Hexbear users have alts on lemmy.ml and midwest.social, so the defederation doesn't stop their users from continuing to be dickheads.
And if you'd like some receipts, I have plenty of examples. Best viewed from an instance that federates with Hexbear, so you can see their behaviour for yourself.
Have you ever been around a child who gets some silly factoid in their head, but it's completely wrong because children are still learning the very basics of synthesizing the observable world into coherent ideas?
Hexbears are like children who have spent the last six hours explaining to you over and over again that cows can breathe under water.
Most of them are tankies (dumb political ideology) but most people took issue with the fact that they were the most annoying people on Lemmy. Every thread they'd be in would be a collection of the worst takes imaginable and they liked to start arguments with everyone else
this, exactly. That the communism site is being sold to the highest bidder is karma, just like the oppressive action of capitalism driving escapism into communism is.
the raw reality is that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism will work. It's like saying "top-down architecture is better than peer-to-peer architecture," or vice-versa. it's foolish. the right architecture depends on the situation being addressed.
If you go to their megathread on the topic you'll see that not only are they not bidding, they're telling people not to bid on their behalf and go to their https://chapo.chat/c/mutual_aid comm and give the money to someone who needs it. So if you have 300+ bucks to set on fire please consider helping someone with their rent or groceries. Or on the kid from Gaza trying to raise money for a prosthetic leg. You'll feel better than spending it on spite.
It's funny, even on the reddit post about it everyone shamed OP saying "are you serious? Spend your money on something worthwhile instead of acting like a toddler." Hexbears aren't even trying to bid on it.