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.
It would probably be easier for them to keep chapo.chat. Should they massively move to lemmy.ml and recreate their communities there, I guess a lot of instances would start to defederate lemmy.ml
Reading through the admin’s post it looks like they have the exact same issue with chapo.chat being registered by an admin who is no longer active and not responding to the rest of the admin team. They explicitly say to view the move to chapo.chat as temporary unless they can get control of that domain.
Sounds like a good lesson for them and many other fediverse instances to form some sort of non-profit/club/organization legal entity and better ensure that these critical items are open to multiple individuals to reduce the bus factor. I would assume having a legal entity would make it easier to get donations to cover costs too.
Y'all are really overthinking this. Have you ever just gotten tired of using some platform or just become less chronically online in any capacity? It doesn't mean they died or had a change of heart. People's interests change over time. Not everyone wants to do the same thing forever.
Right after the r/chapotraphouse sub got banned, they moved to chapo.chat, but the community wasn't really that tied with the chapo trap house podcast anymore, so they moved to hexbear.net.