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
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.
@PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net