hexbear

when the admins were able to provide us with ample warning of Impending Disaster long in advance...

I mean I can see why you'd think that, but I don't think that's actually what any of the admin posts have said specifically. They said an auto-payment failed to go through on the domain (https://hexbear.net/post/4470321), and presumably since the only one with access to it was the AWOL admin, the rest of the admins had no advance notice about this.

What they did say (https://hexbear.net/post/4468531 and others) is that they knew it was possible this could happen in the future because of this person's inconsistent communication and availability. And I mean, maybe I'm reaching here but, an admin with sole access to the domain registrar account must have been around from pretty early on, at least as early as the change from .chat to .net... If you had an old friend who was causing trouble by being unavailable, but would come around every so often and apologize profusely and say it won't happen again, and make things right for the moment... You might be frustrated, but are you really going to air that dirty laundry publicly when as far as you know everything is humming along fine on autopay? No

The other gripes are 100% reasonable though, its wild that the domain was lost in the first place, going no-comms for a month after about getting federation back up isn't great either, nor has communication about non-technical matters been great over the past year+. The defensiveness some people have for the admins, I assume, is because there are some people on this site who seem to just have an axe to grind against the whole admin team and show up in the most sensitive and inflamed struggle sessions and just go full aggro every time... and then go back to posting like nothing happened. Its weird, like yeah definitely normal to have some gripes or quibbles with the admins but if you hate it that much you should just leave for your own sake tbh, the internet is a big place.

I will say it seems like there's a divide between the user-facing admins doing comms and the technical people keeping the site running, and I suspect given how long this stuff has dragged on that it's not a big team, or at least not a lot of them are active. If that's the case I'd really hope they're recruiting from the mod ranks to get more people in, to do more than just keep the lights on. My boss (ugh I know but he's right in this case) points this out all the time, a lot of organizations don't have staff that build things and improve things, they have caretakers. Often skeleton crews. despite the site being almost as big as ever. That's just my theory though. And frankly if they're insisting on anonymity for the admins (for valid reason to be clear), and run a politically sensitive site like this, bringing new people in is a bit of a leap of faith, you can't just bring in anyone who wants it and has the time or skills lest you attract wreckers, doxxers, feds, etc.

the unpaid volunteers bit would be pretty frustrating if it were being wielded as a "no criticism allowed" stick. Like it's true, but for the most part I think everyone here is more than reasonable about that fact.