sorry that’s my bad it was hexbear.chat that won .com came in third, i voted for another one entirely which is why i misremembered but i went back to look for you.

i think (and recommend verifying yourself the threads on this are all public) the admin who actually owned the domain was on a hiatus when the domain was about to expire. They paid the registrar during the ‘pay us or else’ phase but the registrar put the domain up for auction anyway so it was unclear if we were going to get the domain back. chapo.chat was used as a fallback while we figured out next steps in case the registrar didn’t follow their own rules hence the vote. in the end the registrar realized their error i guess and we got the domain back and everything is fine now.

Since the spirit of the site is the comrades and not the domain name everyone took it in good fun for the most part.

I think the admins wanted to made sure everything was stable before refederation because they are polite and didn’t want to cause more work for other admins, but that’s just a guess if they said specifically why i didn’t catch it.