Unlike some, I'm not happy to see Hexbear's troubles (feddit.uk came within a few days of having to restart at a new address because of an absent Admin) but, stumbling across an older thread to find the eye cancer of their gifs all broken, is one for the "pros" column.
They didn't let the domain lapse.
The current crop of "leaders" over there don't have control of the domain, among other things. They knew this was coming, they tried to get hold of the old admins, who are now all MIA. So they started working on migration plans.
Suddenly, one of the old admins reappeared, told them he'd give them all the stuff they needed. So they stopped the migration process.
Old admin kept promising to hand over the keys, but never delivered. Then the domain expired before they were able to move to chapo.chat ... which they know has the same problem, so this is going to happen again. With any luck.