A model-download mirror called Hugging Bay appeared the same week as the openness fight

r/LocalLLaMA·low signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

"The Hugging Bay" hit 768 upvotes on r/LocalLLaMA with a one-line pitch: a new site to download models "in case HF starts censoring or limiting access." The name is a deliberate Pirate Bay reference and the timing is not accidental, it landed alongside the coordinated-slowdown threads and ARC Prize's statement against concentrating access. The site itself returns almost no content to a fetch beyond its title, so operator, catalog size, distribution method and launch date are all unverified, which is a reason to treat it as a sentiment signal about Hugging Face as a single point of failure rather than as usable infrastructure yet.