Wha happen?
USAID frozen and hexbear instantly down?
The admin who owned the domain stepped down then disappeared without handing over the account or domain. It’s up for auction now unfortunately. But at least we can access the server still using chapo.chat or a direct IP connection
domains are bloat anyways, time to hand out IPs
Until someone does a BGP hijack and steals the IP too
Another salute to my Lemmygrad comrades for being the place to turn every time Hexbear goes down.
We’re honestly so lucky to have Lemmygrad as comrades.
🐀 🫡
I’m pretty sure somebody on hexbear has lemmygrad.xyz, that could be hexbear’s new place.
Wow the admin drama there is truly spectacular as this isn’t by any means the first big thing. The fact they couldn’t get contact with this person and just merrily let the timer tick down on website expiration without putting plans into place within a week of the expiry or at least saying something to the community 24 hours before it happened is not a good look.
That domain is GONE. If the reactionaries from other instances or channers or youtubers don’t spot this and drop a ton of money on it to “own” the commies, still have to contend with some reseller grabbing it because of its connection to a memecoin or because of previous website rankings and wanting to squat it to attempt to turn a profit. The only thing that can be said is at least right now USAID and all the other ghouls are having their bank accounts frozen and in full panic mode so I don’t think any of them or their think tank friends are likely to dump 10k on it.
Edit: Just checked and it actually expired on the 12th of January. Their registrar even gave them a 1 month grace period to re-up and during that time no one noticed, no one put plans into place. So it wasn’t like “oh they’ll renew on time”, it was a month of the person failing to renew on time or even in the grace period and either no one noticing or everyone assuming this was fine that they’d missed their re-registration deadline and were on borrowed time.
Honestly, the root of every struggle session that community has had recently all comes down to how much that admin team enjoys LARPing as the Western stereotype version of a Communist Party politburo: as opaque as a black box. Evidently, it’s caused a birds of a feather problem, where the admins find communication challenges even among themselves and attracted the types that would withhold critical site information from each other like domain credentials, brushing the others off with disingenuous assurances that “they’ll definitely renew the domain, trust.” And the others apparently just went “okay” and waited all the way until the time ran out.
The best case scenario is that some rent-seeking site traffic squatter buys out the domain because it could easily be weaponized by a hostile reactionary freak aware of the site’s demographic to maliciously IP grab or phish as disgusting ideological revenge. Plenty of the users take multi-month or even years-long hiatuses from the site and there would be no channels to notify them by if they return and type in “hexbear.net.” There really should have been a front page permanent top banner blaring 24/7 that the domain might be lost and at least familiarizing people with the “chapo.chat” mirror from the moment they knew this could be a possibility since at least September.
The one possible upside of this is that with the site management being the way it is, I’d say that possibility of the site being some fed honeypot has definitely gone down a few notches.
The chapo.chat domain is also owned by the same person I believe and that expires in June. This is a hilariously bad clusterfuck. I’ve been there since day 1 and managed to dodge all the site drama.
Had no idea that it got this bad behind the scenes and this should be a wake up call to the community that we need to have a more open admin team and protocols in place for passing on ownership if something goes down.
Next their VPS expires and the instance disappears completely. (I hope not). Reminder to any sysadmin to do regular off-site backups in case something like that happens.
3-2-1 is some basic knowledge, even though I’ve been guilty of not doing that in the past when the budget was tight. But at least in those cases I’d take as many old PCs as I could find and run backups on them.
COW filesystems like BTRFS/ZFS with btrbk/sanoid are great for this. Only the initial copy may take a while, but after that it only takes the delta between the source and the destination to synchronize. On my main Server I have the OS on a single drive with BTRFS and all the actual data lives on a 4 disk zpool in raidz2. I have cron jobs set up to do hourly snapshots on both and I keep about a week worth of history. The BTRFS one gets synced to an external drive every 24 hours, while the zpool gets synced to another external 4 disk zpool on a weekly basis.
I always seem to inherit the most awfully managed NTFS systems. I really need to migrate our current system to ZFS or BTRFS, but I don’t get paid enough to deal with that.
Plus the company owner is someone who was middle management in on an IT department for years so he’s always rambling on about some stupid proprietary system he remembers from 40 years ago at a sales conference.
Literally the week of the 2024 election, something snapped in the collective minds of the admins and mods of Hexbear. They just woke up one day and decided to implement a ton of changes that I argue destroyed the site.
I deleted my account on Hexbear and took a break. I would still browse a little bit while not logged in, but eventually settled on joining an instance that was federated with Hexbear so I could still follow some of the communities, but with some emotional distance.
I didn’t want to delete my account because I quite like a lot of the content and people there, but man, I probably should have. The constants of the admins wanting the site to be more serious and about organizing and such while insulting (and being transphobic to) their userbase for wanting to laugh at chuds and then letting the domain expire and just not doing anything about it for the month or so the issue became apparent is so embarrassing.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt because forum drama isn’t that serious, but come ooon 😭
I mean yes from the outside you’d think “it’s just a forum” but I mean if you spend multiple hours a day on it and connect with tons of people that share your world view, yeah it means a lot.
Wild. Anyway, glad to see you here comrade
Yea that’s fair, I think I’m downplaying it to myself because I’m kinda bummed about it lmao
Glad to see you too comrade
The one possible upside of this is that with the site management being the way it is, I’d say that possibility of the site being some fed honeypot has definitely gone down a few notches.
Does it really though? Right after USAID funds are frozen along with all kinds of other ops and funding through third parties?
spoiler
Getting into the weeds of this devil’s advocate paranoia here it would be the type of unimportant thing delegated to some cut-out, the exact kind of people locked out of their funds, their offices, their emails right now.
I mean think of the Iraq sub-reddit, it’s clearly important to the US empire to manage that space yet it wasn’t CIA officials but some think-tank cut-out of US imperialist interests running it. I’d imagine in this hypothetical scenario much as people like to imagine someone at FBI HQ personally reading the website every day that it would be delegated to some cut-out.
Now to be clear I’m just playing devil’s advocate in this argument. I’m not saying the top admin was in the pocket of the US or anything that nefarious (though the timing is enough to ensure jokes should be made until the end of time), not trying to freak people out with wild accusations, just that this does nothing to prove or disprove really who the head admin who held everything is or what their agenda may or may not have been. All it really proves is that the other admins of that site have messed up in not pushing much harder to get that access and in not having someone pay attention to this given their infrequent contact with the other person. Certainly if they had someone checking up on this they would have sounded the alarm 30 days ago when it expired and giving people plenty of time to take steps.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. And by accountability I don’t even mean about bad actors, necessarily, more just not being able to hold someone to anything. Being hyperdependent on one or a few people continuing to show up and keep at what they were doing for stuff that can impact hundreds, thousands, or more. I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the design of a lot of the internet. Far too much that ultimately comes down to one single person, with zero accountability process. … I don’t know what the answer is there because it’s hard to have accountability and a stable structure in disjointed borderline anonymous environments, but it has long bothered me.
Part of the answer is m-of-n cryptography (and other crypto), but the tools around it are barely usable for technically inclined people, much less those that aren’t. It’s a common enough story, unfortunately. Theoretically, the tech is all there to ameliorate these problems. Practically, only people with encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric tooling have access. And typically, there aren’t enough of those people to go around.
Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I’m curious and admittedly, when I read “crypto”, I think of big tech grifters, but I know that’s not all of cryptography as a field.
Can you explain more about how this relates to alleviating the problem? I’m curious and admittedly, when I read “crypto”, I think of big tech grifters, but I know that’s not all of cryptography as a field.
Cryptocurrency has forever ruined “crypto” :(
But in any case, m-of-n cryptography (Shamir Secret Sharing) permits “m” keys out of a total “n” keys to unlock a secret, such as the login credentials for a domain registrar. So long as “m” keys are available, the login credentials can be recovered. This avoids having a single point of failure, for example, where only one person knows the login credentials and is AWOL. So long as “m” other folks are still around and active, they can recover the login credentials without the AWOL person.
Oh interesting, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
RIP. It will be a miracle if they can get that domain back.
I’m curious.
What happened here?
I’m furious.
What happened here?
I’m curious.
What happened here?
The one person with the keys to the building went AWOL.
I was just referencing the, I think, last meme that we had on Hexbear.
What happened there?
I’m curious.
:(
Hexbear just died? Wow. I didn’t know that…it led an amazing life. What else can you say? It was an amazing site, whether you agree or not. It was an amazing site who led an amazing life. I’m actually sad to hear that.
chirp chrip
If this isn’t resolved then it is, and will continue to be, the worst news of 2025.
Communism has been defeated. I can hear Kissinger laughing through his mouth full of piss and shid.
This is punishment for all the celebrating we did when he died
My new favorite webpage, thank you
USAID shutdown.
Joking aside I hope this gets fixed. I desperately need to shitpost about the bill to acquire Greenland and name it Red, White, and Blueland.
I know this meme can be kinda edgy, but I actually enjoyed some Hexbear communities I watched on my lurking.
I’ll see you on the other side it looks like
Very unlikely to be the end of the instance, thankfully. It’ll just change name to something else silly.
But what about things like the emojis?
Are those backed up somewhere to be uploaded on another instance? Do we even know the list of communities we had? I feel like it’s going to take so much to even migrate.
Ur misunderstanding what happened. This has nothing to do with the servers. This is just a DNS issue. The URL doesnt direct to the servers correctly. But the server is still there. Running normally.
Ooh, okay. Yeah, I don’t know anything about this stuff.
That’s good to hear though if it makes migrating easier.
Ok so when you go to google.com first your computer connects to a DNS server. This server usually set by your ISP unless you changed it manually, has a list of URLs and their IPs.
Lets says google.com points to the IP 1.2.3.4.5 the DNS server sends you do that IP which is the actual IP of the host server for googles website.
If you just typed in google.com and had no DNS server your browser would get an error and display nothing.
When you run a site like hexbear.net you need to BUY a url to have point to your IP. This involves paying a monthly fee. If you dont pay it then it can be bought by someone else. And they can point the URL to a different IP.
This is what has happened. The Hexbear.net url wasnt paid for and is now up for auction. Whoever buys the URL can point it anywhere they want. But if the people who run the hexbear site want they can just get a new URL and point it to their server. Thats why chapo.chat still works.
they struck down hexbear
I think it’s no longer federating with ml. It’s so quiet now. I’d just gotten so used to all the farts
Hey sorosfootsoldier! I made an alt here because of this…hey everyone else! 👋
Hey comrade. I just set my theme to vaporwave and it almost feels like home.
yeah this shit sucks dude. I want my fucking emojis back.
Socialism on one instance? Is it happening? (JK I hope the domains come back up)
Time to change domain and pretend to be libs to infiltrate their shitty instances again!
and so, the chapos continue their migration flight, to greener grass perhaps.
The chapo.chat url still works
Capturing just in case:
$ dig +short chapo.chat 37.187.73.130 $
