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.

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 am not writing this to shit on them, but I have to appreciate the irony in the situation. Something about a communist community getting messed up by lapses in individual responsibility, or an authoritarian leaning community getting messed up by fuckups in leadership.

Bidding ends in 9 days.

Edit: Current bid is up to ~~$305~~ ~~$505~~ ~~$676~~ ~~$710~~ ~~$1920~~ ~~$2345~~ $2365

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.

Popcorn! Get'cher popcorn here! Can't have a good fedidrama without that delicious buttery popcorn!

OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My 3 favorite proposed alternative urls are tank.ie hexbearmoretankie.net and infinity.ai

It's up to $1921 now lol

Just add the following line to your host file and add an override to your DNS:

37.187.73.130 hexbear.net

Problem solved, this is how we did it in 1985.

Well I'm impressed that just defederating from them was enough to basically kill the site.

It should probably go to furry coders.

I think it's hilarious that there is a bidding war that has been driving the bid up.

Sad but kinda hilarious. Lemmy.ca appears to have a better succession plan in place through the nonprofit organization...

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?)

Wait, what??? Isn’t this a hugely active instance? What happened?

Auction you say?

Is there a remind me bot on Lemmy? Asking for a friend that might do something financially irresponsibly hilarious at last second if the auction values doesn't go much higher.

yep this is a downside to being on a federated server run by some rando.

Their instance seems to be back up again. A sad day for us all.