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
Not really doable without a rooted phone, but if you’re tech-savvy and dedicated enough you could rig up a local DNS on your network (like a pi-hole) and override there
Does just bookmarking the IP address work?
Unfortunately no, cloudflare (content delivery network) prevents that (which is a good thing in every circumstance except this one)
Admins can correct me (edit: I stand corrected, see below), I think this should at least kinda work as a temporary bookmark replacement, since it will redirect you to the current legit hexbear domain. Currently, if you go to http://37.187.73.130/ in your browser, it will HTTP redirect to https://chapo.chat/. But emojis and probably some other things won’t work since they’re hardcoded to download from hexbear.net.
But long term, bookmarking a static IP address isn’t as safe as using the domain name, because a) there’s no verification that the machine serving you 37.187.73.130 is the one who can prove it owns hexbear.net (or chapo.chat), leaving you open to a variety of attacks, b) the hexbear IP doesn’t have to stay static. The safest way is to navigate to the domain name and use HTTPS so that your browser checks that the server giving you the page also can prove it’s the server that owns the name.
Won’t work in all cases because when you connect via HTTP you send the server the IP/Domain as part of the request to see the page.
CloudFlare IPs host multiple domains, and if you send the IP CloudFlare won’t know where to actually send you.
ah that makes sense! I didn’t realize it was some shared IP/tunnel situation