Auction: https://www.sav.com/auctions/details/7073489/hexbear.net
Not sure what will happen, but seems to be a Fediverselore event for sure
Update: post from hexbear admin on chapo.chat: https://chapo.chat/post/4468531
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.
You don’t really need to “trust” the admins if you think of your account like a throwaway.
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.
what’s up with manjaro?
Don’t have a horse in the race myself (since I use arch, btw) but e.g. here is a compiled list of some past issues.
830 days since manjaro last fucked up. I’ve been using manjaro for a while. other than some hiccups i’d expect of a rolling release distro i’ve been fairly happy with it
The current vibe definitely is “Dont pay money to cyberlandlords, give it to people in the mutual_aid comm”. Let it go and get a new domain
They dont own that one either somehow lol
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They didn’t really move. That hostname has been a synonym for hexbear.net all along. It may have been the instance’s original hostname.
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, added to the OP
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.
they had a genuinely traumatic experience
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”.
Dunking on other instances was literally the entire reason they federated in the first place. Their users were salivating at what they would do to lemmy.ca before we defed’d.
They love to paint themselves as victims.
Their users wanted to defederate right away when they saw the rest of Lemmy. The people in charge (able to pull the switch) kept telling them to hold on and it’d get better. A small number of people made the decision for all of them. It’s all the rest for whom I genuinely feel bad. Their community was highjacked and, I think to them, attacked. I can have empathy for the average users.
Having seen how Hexbear interacted with other instances, I have zero empathy for them. They were an incredibly nasty group of people towards anyone who thought differently to them.
Seeing some new users in your online community who disagree with you
It takes so very little for liberals to take their masks off and start talking word-for-word exactly the same as incel nazis.
If you see anything that’s factually incorrect in my comment, please go ahead and point it out.
How about instead of puffing your chest out like an online incel douchebag asking me to cross a brand new line in the sand, you respond to what was already pointed out.
i.e. you being an incel nazi cosplayer and pulling the ‘just simply for disagreeing and nothing else’ bullshit you and every other incel nazi uses every time your behavior is called out
what was already pointed out.
Almost nothing has been pointed out. You said my comment resembles those of “incel nazis”. No actual explanation or concrete criticism, just aggressive vocabulary and vague accusations. Of course, you can’t provide anything more than that - had i actually given even a hint of support for nazi ideology, you’d easily point it out, rather than just calling out… my wording?
bullshit you and every other incel nazi uses every time your behavior is called out
What is this “my/our behaviour” that you’re talking about exactly?
I didn’t explicitly give verbal support to specific nazi parties (motte) I just said these snowflakes go running whenever some vague and nonspecific disagreement happens! (bailey)
You can’t criticize me for using the exact same rhetorical tools literal nazis use and in the exact same context! It’s just a coincidence! You have to follow my rules and satisfy my framing!
Ah, I saw a lot of people traumatized by their posting, but it is the first time I hear about the opposite.
Hexbear is the only place online I’ve found that I feel most comfortable speaking my mind as a neurodivergent queer communist. People act like hexbear is some harsh authoritarian zone, it just simply doesn’t condone chauvinism, transphobia, or let people post western propaganda without it being questioned. Some people react poorly to the way they are responded to on hexbear when they post some bullshit that we’ve heard and debunked 1000 times already.
They also made a habit of “raiding” other instances, and outright flooding any conversation they didn’t agree with with the most vile takes they could come up with, or, failing that, the pig shit Gif.
But yeah, they’re secretly caring people, sure.
They also made a habit of “raiding” other instances,
Lol, I love seeing the mythology of hexbear evolve in real time. I particularly like how you put “raiding” in inverted commas to make it seem like you’re quoting something, rather than just making it up whole cloth.
I mean, I saw it happen. You argue with one, and twenty others show up and just flood the thread.
But sure, keep lying to yourself about how your friends are secretly caring people or whatever.
Yes, that’s how federation works lol.
Their community reminds me of that one Something Awful subforum with the same style. I guess hexbear is just a younger demographic
Homie, they inundated everywhere else with their bile, very few people actually came to their instance.
They were the traumatic experience.
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. 🤷♂️
Updated my blocklist, thank you
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.
Honestly I’d donate. Would love to see them seethe.
I’d rather people just fund their instances or the developers
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.
Couldn’t somebody buy it and change it to force all the assholes out and then change things to make it a proper instance?
Idk how federation works, but I imagine the domain name isn’t the only thing that ties the instanses together together?
I could be wrong
nah they could, theyd just change it to their ip address, like the domain vendor deleted their ip address from the records when they didn’t pay
That’s not how the Fediverse works. Instances are per domain, not per IP address. You can change IPs however often you want, as long as your domain points to the right server.
It would still be a different instance behind that same domain name
That doesn’t matter to fediverse software. Any new instance on hexbear.net would have errors when trying to federate with other instances, and it probably wouldn’t be able to do so at all. But even if it did manage it, what are you expecting to do to mitigate the errors that arise from other instances referencing users/threads/posts/comments/communities/modlogs that existed on the old instance, but do not exist on the new one?
referencing users/threads/posts/comments/communities/modlogs that existed on the old instance, but do not exist on the new one
Yeah, that’s what I was talking about. It would be a different instance that doesn’t have the same database as the original one.
care packages to families of Uyghur muslims detained in concentration camps in China.
So right to the pockets of Adrian Zenz?
Bidding ends in 9 days.
Edit: Current bid is up to
$305$505$676$710$1920$2345$2365
That’s going to be crazy
As @Sunshine@lemmy.ca mentioned it’s now at $505.
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. 🍿
Wouldn’t it be better to agree whatever bit yall want to do with the domain name and spend the money on something more productive? Here’s a father trying to buy his kid a new leg after Israel blew it off.
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.
I’m j_s_0e6b87 aka JS. Linking r/neoliberal? Pfffft, not even close! I want to Make Hexbear Great Again. It’ll talk about the wonders of NATO, and how Israel is doing the right thing (if you disagree you’re Antisemitic and a living proof of the horseshoe theory). I also want to denounce the horrors of mayocide and shitty image reactions, plus insert the Nazi 14 words there otherwise it’s literally 1984. (Just kidding.)
Okay, serious now. I don’t know what’s up with this bidding war; this shit is weird. Currently the highest bid is at US$710, that’s 200x more than I have in my wallet*. And it’s perfectly possible that the bidders are all doing it for different reasons: perhaps they believe that it had enough traffic to justify the price, or they want to recover it for your instance, or they are indeed in some weird vendetta.
And if it’s a vendetta it could be for a thousand reasons. It could be anticommunism, but it could be as well some HB user behaving like a wild monkey outside your home instance and getting someone pissed enough to do this stupid shit.
*R$20, or roughly US$3.50. Yup. If I had some money I’d gladly donate to Karim.
I mean they just try to collect the highest bid and then ban you if you don’t pay. I’m thinking it’s just someone fucking around.
Edit: yeah I’m guessing this is it. If you social engineer support and pretend to be them… Seems like John Smith is the bidders’ name on the site, before they turned me away.
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.
It’s a popcorn fest for everyone! Including Hexbear users, they clearly don’t give a fuck about the address itself.
My guesses are, in order:
- Same as you, they’re just driving up the price. They’ll stop bidding near the end.
- They genuinely want the address because they have some really bad bone to pick against HB, and they have more than enough money to waste on it.
- Some really clueless HB user wants the address, even if their own admins said to not bother.
Theres also the possibility it’s the owner of the scamcoin which is also named hexbear
Unlikely. As I mentioned elsewhere, the last transaction of said coin was 886d ago, and it’s priced at zero. That coin is dead.
aw that would’ve been funny
Not going to lie, it would.
Same, it’s going to be an intense 9 days from now on. The finale is a great mystery as to how will everything turn out. What will be the final price? Will people cancel their bids? What will be shown on the new site? Who’s the one bidding? Who will win? And all the drama and arguing in the meantime too. Lemmy’s going to be busy.
Now I wanna raise a bunch of money to buy it and use it as a good way to document shitty behavior on the internet.
What a fascinating idea! Though I’d say there were many decent people there, I think.
To the moon. Still 9 days to go, now $676
Can you share a link to the auction?
It’s in the post’s body.
Oh…I guess I’m an idiot then…
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 aquisitionEdit: 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
Supposedly they don’t bid.
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If I had the money I’d buy it and replace every post with goatse.
EDIT: wtf the insane asylum is loose. Halp
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.
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.
“No longer active” presumably means “died in Ukraine?”
I’m taking it as “grew up and realised he had been an idiot, so stopped talking to them or supporting the cause”
What is chapo.chat? I can see that it runs Lemmy 0.19.8 but is it just not federated or something?
Seems to be kind of a backup domain/instance the hexbear admins have? Not sure to be honest, hopefully someone else can chime in
It’s the same instance. That’s just a synonymous hostname that points to the same IP address.
Right after the r/chapotraphouse sub got banned, they moved to chapo.chat, but the community wasn’t really that tied with the chapo trap house podcast anymore, so they moved to hexbear.net.
But they also said that the same issue will occur with it too, in time.
Just add the following line to your host file and add an override to your DNS:
37.187.73.130 hexbear.netProblem solved, this is how we did it in 1985.
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Found their missing admin!
lol at the idea of just running the site off their laptop or something for all these years. Any time the site went down it was just them closing the lid.
This won’t work in the fediverse. Sure you’ll be able to reach hexbear but no fediverse server would be able to federate content into it.
no problem.
Is Hexbear even federated with anything?
You’re on one of the many instances Hexbear is federated with. It’s more that a few of the larger instances like .world are defederated.
I don’t see much Hexbear floating by here.
They show up on Lemmy.ml if someone federated with Hexbear posts there, as an example.
The instance that I’m on for example.
federation isn’t working for hexbear currently due to them loosing the domain
so that IP resolves to https://chapo.chat/ but it uses the Hexbear.net’s resources?oh now I understand…
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).
Ps. I was born in 1989. Lol
I’ve done that as late as the 2010’s, but I am old timey
Popcorn! Get’cher popcorn here! Can’t have a good fedidrama without that delicious buttery popcorn!
I’ll have a large with extra salt, please.
Oh, hell, and some milk duds too, it’s gonna be a good show.
Don’t forget all the sparkling water provided by the colourful users of hexbear.
OMG!!!
I have more fitting memes. :D
7 images
Please post them on the reaction memes community when you can, I don’t have much time to do it myself (T~T)
Will post some of them in a moment.
Fuck yeah!
It’s up to $1921 now lol
Oh wow, this post reminded me to renew some domains I use.
It should probably go to furry coders.
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.
Looks like it expired last month so they had a 1 month grace period
I am willing to bet that the contact person is either gone or not checking email. It wouldn’t surprise me if they lost access to the portal.
Ironic that it’s capitalism that’s going to take down Hexbear.
Yeah but on the other hand it’ll hardly be the first time this community has moved. Looking at the frontpage of chapo.chat the userbase doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the possibility.
That isn’t ironic. That’s entirely on brand. Ironic would be if they got taken down due to leftist infigh-actually, no, that’s also on brand. I guess if Trump - no, that would also…
…Is this what they mean by “irony-poisoned”?
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.
Sad but kinda hilarious. Lemmy.ca appears to have a better succession plan in place through the nonprofit organization…
Yeah they got their shit together pretty well. The admin is a great person and I admire them for what they did.
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.
They openly idolize Stalin. That’s not from a couple rogue users
The guy who spent his youth robbing banks to fund a revolution, succeeded, went on to beat the nazis, and helped lay the foundation for the greatest increase in standards of living in the modern age outside of China?
Even if you accept legitimate criticisms about the guy, such as interning/relocating populations in the wake of WWII, various loses the CPC took due to following his mandates, his failure to support Korea, etc, and understand him as a part of a greater machine accomplishing these things rather than the idealist “great man theory” nonsense that encourages hero worship in the first place, it’s hard not to idealize revolutionary heros like him and Fidel.
Holy shit
I’m not a fan of Hitler or anything
I just really really hate the guy who beat him
Stalin was a fine with Hitler. Helped Hitler invade Poland. Killing some of my family. Then massacring ethnic polish at home, killing more family. Stalin only turned against Hitler after Hitler crossed him. That the Soviet Union helped defeat Hitler was fine. But doesn’t excuse allying with him first. Or the Soviet genocides and oppression.
Deep down I want to know if you’re lying deliberately because you’re a nazi or if you’re just a particularly stupid person.
Hitler had a book. In it he said what he wanted to do. The leadership of the Soviet Union read this book. They did not think they were friends with Hitler.
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How does that disprove what I said. It doesn’t. How does that bring back any dead family? It can’t. I’m an anarchist fuck authoritarians whether they’re capitalist or pretend socialist.
They did contact the original owner - who promised (reputedly) to take care of it. Then disappeared (yet again, after repeatedly having done so in the past so many times before). It’s even possible that they did this out of some kind of spite? But perhaps not, maybe it’s merely irresponsibility, and even that due to ADHD or some such, who knows (I did not read through every comment, just enough to know this much).
It is not merely users going rouge (edit: no you know what, fuck it, I’m leaving this spelling exactly as it is, bc it’s 2025 baby! and this apparently is how we roll now) there are posts (not merely moderator reports, which don’t federate particularly with their older software) where they are made aware, and the admins chose to ignore the situation each time rather than ban the person involved. They actively shielded them from consequences, rather than merely allowing them to do whatever. Thus necessitating others to take steps of their own to deal with matters.
Seeing how “responsible” they are, nobody believes the red scare issue - especially people who are ACTUALLY leftist as opposed to whatever fucked up thing tankies are to begin with, and then like that squared (three times over) and possibly reversed and shifted further into the imaginary dimension, to describe whatever the heck Hexbear has going on specifically. Regardless of political views. imho at least, ofc:-).
They did contact the original owner - who promised (reputedly) to take care of it.
That’s important info.
Perhaps the original owner is so disengaged already that they aren’t giving too much of a fuck about the fate of the instance. I can’t exactly blame them.
It is not merely users going rouge (edit: no you know what, fuck it, I’m leaving this spelling exactly as it is, bc it’s 2025 baby! and this apparently is how we roll now)
Stop making me remember a certain movie! Okay, the movie is great, so keep reminding me of it. (Moulin Rouge. Their version of Roxanne is way better than The Police’s original. Kind of like Concrete Blonde’s Everybody Knows vs. Cohen’s)
But I digress. Yes, the users were going rouge :-P under the implicit approval of the instance admins; that’s why I say that the rule there against misbehaving in other instances was “toilet paper”, it’s just there to get shit.
Seeing how “responsible” they are, nobody believes the red scare issue
Yup. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, isn’t it?
Anyway, I hope that the good ones still stick around. And even the bad ones should get a place… just away from my sight. (Perhaps in truth social, showing their “critical support” to Trump. Hehe.)
Has chapo chat been federated with us this entire time? I’m just trying to understand what it actually is.
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 get that but do we need to defederate from them or not? It seems like they don’t have federation enabled or something.
sh.itjust.works
yeah better defederate just to make sure
sigh
That’s a funny way of saying you have no clue what chapo.chat actually is. Hexbear is the epitome of the blind leading the blind.
I could never have imagined that certain leftists were equally as stupid and ignorantly abrasive as MAGA trumpers, but you clowns have proven it beyond all doubt. It’s so profoundly concerning and disappointing 😑
Why can’t you just act like a mature adult and answer a simple question? Why must you incessantly seek to spread divisiveness and misery?
No it’s a funny way of saying your instance sucks
Who is spreading divisiveness? You are explicitly asking if you need to take additional steps to divide yourself from elsewhere.
Not to distract attention from your frankly obsessive and weird hate rant
I’m asking if chapo.chat is part of Lemmy or not. Do they federate with other servers, or is it isolated? Just answer the damn question.
I explicitly federated sh.itjust.works with hexbear, at the request of your fearless leader u/CARCOSA, and I took a whole bunch of shit from all sides for that decision. Then you defederated us within 24 hours, because you couldn’t handle losing arguments with our users. I have always tried to be reasonable with you people but it counts for nothing, because you just attack and abuse everyone you come into contact with, and you actively refuse to confront reality.
Don’t worry, hexbear/whatever is going to be called will almost certainly block sh.itjust.works along with other right-wing instances when it enables federation again
Cheers, we already blocked chapo.chat pre-emptively. Glad that we’re on the same page.
