Hi folks!
As most of you have already noticed, the technical issues blocking federation have finally been worked out, and we have refederated with Lemmygrad! Federation with other instances will come after we have confirmed no lingering ill effects from the retvrn-to-chapochat period, likely within the day. The change happened ~12 hours ago, but some further cajoling was necessary to get the servers actually talking again. (Edit: re-federation with other instances has begun. Edit 2: federation now enabled for all previously fed'ed instances)
Lemmygrad comrades, we are so happy to be back 
(Thanks for making this graphic @TheImmortalScienceML@lemmygrad.ml )
I had no idea what was going on I heard that someone else took the domain name and I thought that's what happened
The domain name was originally registered with Sav.com, a particularly scummy registrar known for sniping and auctioning off dropped domains. As it turns out, they aren't any kinder to their own customers than anyone else, and without sufficient warning (seemingly in violation of ICANN policies), they sent our domain to be auctioned off when a scheduled payment didn't go through, kicking off a frenzy of anti-communists trying to buy it.
Specifically, a registrar operating in good faith will generally disable resolution of the domain after it has expired, to alert the owner/users that it is expired and in the grace period to renew, but Sav does not, preferring to take domain owners by surprise and let the domain fully expire, forcing them to compete on the open auction to get their domain back.
Somehow, we managed to transfer it out of Sav to a less scummy registrar during the auction, recovering the domain for free. However, the 2 weeks or so where we were operating off of chapo.chat as a backup domain ended up causing a lot of technical headaches and roadblocks to re-enabling federation, hence the delay.
Porkbun, ftw
Sorry, I keep accidentally using my other account because Jerboa doesn't link me to the instance the post is made in instead of the poster. I prefer to keep my accounts separate in each instance.