Ooooh. That explains it. Yeah, it just switched over to the redirect to sav.com for me.
I think they're fucked. Because of how Lemmy does federation, there's no way that I know of to switch the domain for an existing instance without changing the name and making everyone resubscribe to everything. Although, they probably talk mostly to one another so they could probably change the name to hexbear.social or something with just a little temporary disruption if they don't feel like coming up with $300. Personally, I definitely wouldn't want to cooperate with the domain extortion, I'd rather change domains.
I think they now have to win the auction, though. It's $300 to renew for the year currently, and still rising, instead of the $12 it was going to be.
I do not think anyone should bid the price up. Hexbear may be a bunch of cunts, but all you're doing with that is giving money to some criminals who are much worse than the Hexbear people.