Fediverse

Well yea but what is it in this specific context? I have no idea what this is

That doesn't really clear anything up, tbh, I don't know what this is or why I care about their domain expiring this post did nothing to explain that

They literally didnt pay their under 20$ a year fee for renewal, its their own fault for not having the domain be with the same person managing hosting, it's like amateur stuff to at least have them be an authorized user.

They were in contact with the dude who owns it a few times, wouldve taken minutes to add them as authorized users

I mean unlike housing, you don't actually need to pay for a domain name. There are plenty of free alternatives if you ill like paying for a TLD, and in lieu of that you could just memorise the IP, or even instruct people to change their hosts file.

I like how a whole community of academics and researchers worked out how to run a system which, even into the modern day which is kind of amazing, is largely disconnected from being abused by government and industry, and just runs according to what the people who need to use the system need it to do. You can get extorted for a fancy domain name if you really want to, but you can also go to Hostinger and get one for $5/year or something, because a lot of the core of the system is still pretty well-protected from being a cash-grab, through application of good governance and cooperation.

And then, somehow Hexbear managed to find their way around that system and fucked things up for themselves, and now it's all DNS's fault that they stepped in a pile of doo doo.

Never forget the architects of the internet were some of the vilest US MIC and Silicon Valley ghouls who ever lived and they are still in control fundamentally no matter how much ICANN and IANA claim to be non-partison, neutral, non-political, accountable, democratic, international, stewardshipismists

Yes, John Postel and David Mills were some of the vilest ghouls and so on. There was nothing about them that could provide a good model for how to do effective cooperation and succeed outside the systems of ownership that defined computing and telecommunications at the time, no particular reason they succeeded so dramatically and gave you, ultimately, this space to post pig balls today, and nothing about their work and traditions that needs to be defended against any silicon valley ghouls in the modern day. You fucking dingbat. I started out sticking up for you guys because no one deserves to get victimized by DNS scammers, but I take it back, go fuck yourselves.

(It's a joke/reference, I guess it's not 100% known though. My bad.)

I really do hate "I know what I have so you are going to pay whatever number I set" capitalism though, which is what they do here. These registrars figured out a loophole around the redemption grace period and are, from the start, set up to make you lose the domain and then spend significant money on a completely unfair auction where they have the power to plant fake bids, rather than paying the usual static redemption fees that aren't that excessive.