Hexbear down when USAID got shut down?
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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the funding ran out, we really dragged our feet on diversifying into Xi Bucks π
What's the ratio of Stanley nickles to Xi Bucks?
It's always something with hexbear
Thread on where they go from here:
https://chapo.chat/post/4470321
Right now the registrar stands to make over $2000 from auctioning this site. That's a lot more than whatever renewal HB were going to pay and once it sells for that whoever buys it then has a much higher renewal fee thereafter (hundreds of dollars a year probably) as a result of that valuation which they can in theory reap year after year. Even should the person buying it drop it immediately their hosting company stands to reap more from this one auction and year than if they'd continued to host with them for 10 years.
This was entirely a self-own on HexBear's part. A list:
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Their admins did not press strongly enough to get access they needed to the domain name account.
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Admins knowing the person having these details was flaky did not monitor things like domain renewal and such, if they had they would have noticed while the grace period was still active and could (apparently) have quickly reached the person with access within the 30 days required and fixed it. The person with access was able to be reached we see now within 2-3 days. That's not a difficult person to reach or they got damn lucky with timing.
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Person who had access almost certainly got some sort of notice. This either went to an unmonitored email π or was ignored.
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Their post on it here is made by an anonymous admin. Once again their admins are obfuscating, not being transparent with the userbase and acting a too much like bad actor groups like MAC on reddit in thinking themselves some appointed council of ideology and ethics in charge of their userbase and guiding them to preferred conclusions established by discussions within this secret group.
(To be fair to 4 their userbase does need guidance given how many left-libs and people who haven't read theory are there, they have let in a lot of liberalism but too often these struggles and edicts are not on principled meaningful matters like addressing the misogyny issue but on pet causes, minor tiffs, arguments over phrasing, etc)
Let alone saying nothing to the community about the impending issue and mitigations (fallback sites, risk of cyberattack if continuing to use the old domain, ...)
The lack of warning when they knew of this issue well ahead of time, the lack of accountability after it happened, and the lack of clear information have frankly undermined my trust in Hexbear's moderation team. Ultimately I still favor Hexbear's culture over Lemmygrad's, and don't know how much more trustworthy the admins here are, though.
I'm glad to have both.
There are certain times I just need to be with other ML's but lemmygrad is admittedly small and therefore limited in the amount of discussion a post gets as well as how many topics are posted and it's nice to have a bigger community even if it's less laser-aligned with my philosophy on all aspects and at times has a culture I need a breather from for a few minutes despite overall liking it. I enjoy community events like movie nights that you have over there a great deal and I think it's a very good thing.
The admins as a whole I cannot say. The head admin, the owner is a main lemmy dev and I also know them from reddit where they were consistently a poster with principled, quality effort years before I ever heard of this place or lemmy was really even publicly known at all. So I trust the top admin here quite a bit, if they dipped out the whole lemmyverse would notice and ideologically I trust them to an incredible amount.
Agreed. It'd probably take a full changeover of the admin team to give me any confidence that if something is wrong someone will say something... But even opening the door to possible cyberattack and doxxing of comrades is always going to be a stain on the website for me. I've been on from day 1 but I question if I will continue with the site after this -- not that it really matters if I'm there lol but still
Really malicious negligence by the admin team against the community
For a while I've fantasized about starting a new Lemmy instance, which would be either an Esperanto or Norwegian language equivalent to Hexbear. When I've spoken to comrades about this they've been interested but said they didn't have the resources for it. Depending on how the coming weeks play out I might have to adopt a Pippi Longstocking mindset on this matter...
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Why bother doing a vote if its only going to be open for 12 hrs? Its a world wide site with users that dont log in every day.
They've done this a number of times about a bunch of issues. The admins/mods must think everyone is as online as they are. I was very online on hexbear back in the day but even this would always make me go π€
(To be fair to 4 their userbase does need guidance given how many left-libs and people who havenβt read theory are there, they have let in a lot of liberalism but too often these struggles and edicts are not on principled meaningful matters like addressing the misogyny issue but on pet causes, minor tiffs, arguments over phrasing, etc)
this assumes that the admin/mod team are more advanced than the userbase, for which there is very little evidence
as far as i know, only 1 member of the admin team is even in a party, which i would consider the bare minimum for anyone trying to "steer the ship" so to speak
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The one thing that I always hated about those votes on Hexbear was how they intentionally used the most difficult to visually discern emojis for each of the options (Really, look at how similar option 1 and 3 are from each other) and they also try to put their thumb on the scale by making option 2 the emoji with the more positive expression. The most bullshit, baby brained consent manufacturing I've ever seen.
Yeah it's pretty weird how they use emojis like that for voting and all of the same character at that with different expressions. And I completely agree it's biasing and something the mods can manipulate a bit because one of them is literally a character frowning, another a character grinning and those have influences I'm sure. Very unserious if I have to be honest and part of why I'm glad we have lemmygrad because it's kind of a never-ending festival of leftist trolling/memeing over there a lot of the time and that gets draining. There are times it feels a little nice of course, I'm not saying there's no room for it as it can be a good thing after a long day or week but it reaches its limits at times.
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This is why we must have laws against the buying and selling of domains. Domains that are unused must become collective property.
I feel like if a domain is active the auction should defer to the current domain users instead of immediately going public.
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5 bidders in a bid war that ends in 9 days and its already at $505
I wonder if there's just a ring of people who just bid up domains in collusion with the registrar.
God what a fucking shitty company. Holding your domain hostage and then you get to "bid" to get your domain back.
Fuck these assholes.
Might also mostly be domain scavenging bots that slap garbage ad sites up on high-ish traffic sites.
Hexbear also shares a name with some random crypto coin, that could be a reason the bidding is going so high. random libs wanting to one up da tankies, and also crypto bros gunning for the domain.
three way brawl between radlibs fascists and crypto bros lol
that's just one guy fighting with himself!
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Could also be one of those freaks who have the free time and disposable money to buy the lemmygrad.com domain
i was Not prepared to see where that redirected to. fuck
Used to be a maga page earlier
For anyone wondering, it redirects to the website of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.
Is that funded by AIPAC?
The first words I read were
- Show up to support Israel
- Give to support Israel
- Find support for you & yours [photo shows a girl with a candle holding a Zionist flag with a Zionist flag sticker on her sweater]
- Take action to support Israel
I can't say if it's funded by AIPAC but we can at the very least clearly see where the organization's priorities lie.
Wow that's really funny.
oh fuck
It's at nearly $700 now. I am not one to peddle baseless weirdo conspiracy theories but this seems sus af.
What we know: The user that previously held ownership of the OG domain has ceased contact and the domain is now up for auction.
Tinfoil hat time: The deep state is going to start targeting sites and communities like this because we offer a very meager threat to them and much like us they know dissent must be eradicated at its roots.
I really have no idea what a high traffic domain name is worth in terms of revenue from throwing garbage ads up on it. Maybe $700 isnβt out of the ordinary.
It'll just be libs and maybe misguided comrades with too much money thinking the domain name actually matters. It's not like hexbear gets linked from outside that often. I hope some maligned lib pays $5k for it, realises it's worth nothing, and starts a journey where they learn to touch grass instead.
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Simplest answer: it's the crypto scammers of hexbear.io driving it up
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Time to migrate to pigpoop.ball
pigpoop.beanis
this would be an excellent new domain name lol
Lol. What a beautiful dumpster fire of a website.
Hexbear has an official Mastodon account at https://toots.matapacos.dog/@hexbear
Hexbear admins intermittently post updates there in case of emergencies such as this one. People wanting to follow the state of Hexbear as told by official sources should look into following this account. You can also append .rss to the URL to get an RSS feed.
@GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml please edit this information into the main post.
done
Wow they are being pretty light on the details on their Mastodon. Is "Hexbear is back up at Chapo.chat" really a good summary of this situation? Interesting choices all around
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Bruh it's at 2400 dollars HOW
rip i was wondering why i couldn't access the site through jerboa, -_-
So.. where will we go now???
yer there.
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