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Lfgss shutting down 16th March 2025 (day before Online Safety Act is enforced)

798 points by buro9 2y ago

figured this might be interesting... I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users. most of this is on Linode instances and Hetzner instances, a couple of the larger fora go via Cloudflare, but the rest just hits the server. and it's all being shut down. the UK Online Safety Act creates a massive liability, and whilst at first glance the risk seems low the reality is that moderating people usually provokes ire from those people, if we had to moderate them because they were a threat to the community then they are usually the kind of people who get angry. in 28 years of running forums, as a result of moderation I've had people try to get the domain revoked, fake copyright notices, death threats, stalkers (IRL and online)... as a forum moderator you are known, and you are a target, and the Online Safety Act creates a weapon that can be used against you. the risk is no longer hypothetical, so even if I got lawyers involved to be compliant I'd still have the liability and risk. in over 28 years I've run close to 500 fora in total, and they've changed so many lives. I created them to provide a way for those without families to build families, to catch the waifs and strays, and to try to hold back loneliness, depression, and the risk of isolation and suicide... and it worked, it still works. but on 17th March 2025 it will become too much, no longer tenable, the personal liability and risks too significant. I guess I'm just the first to name a date, and now we'll watch many small communities slowly shutter. the Online Safety Act was supposed to hold big tech to account, but in fact they're the only ones who will be able to comply... it consolidates more on those platforms.

agnishom 2y ago
Remember when Omegle shut down recently? https://web.archive.org/web/20231109003559/https://omegle.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231109003559/https://omegle.co... It seems that some people are convinced that the benefits of having strangers interact with each other are not worth the costs. I certainly disagree.
- immibis 2y ago
  Omegle was widely known to be full of underage children and overage child sexual predators. If I designed a site for 14-year-old girls to sext with 30-year-old men it would be rightfully shut down. If I designed a site as a fun chat site but becomes in actual reality it became a sexting site for 14-year-old girls with adult men, should it be shut down?
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wkat4242 2y ago
I'm really sad this stuff is happening. For me the hobby sites are by far the best part of the internet. All the commercial stuff gets enshittified. I hardly use any commercial social media or forums anymore. I don't believe this kind of regulation will do anything but put the real criminals more underground while killing all these helpful community initiatives. It's just window dressing for electoral purposes.
mrx007 2y ago
I'm wondering, would putting the forum behind auth wall 'solve' this 'problem'? Forum users already have accounts, and make it not too difficult for new users to sign up.. Otherwise content would be not accessible to unauthed users. Or another thought, distribute it only through VPN, OpenVPN can be installed on mobiles these days (I have one installed on my Android). Make keys creation part of registration process.
Separo 2y ago
I haven't read the act and am not going to, but, for this size community I'm pretty sure having a flag/report button would do the trick, and to go the extra mile, with very cheap LLM's generating a "dodgy content" score on every message would be pretty trivial. This seems a bit knee-jerk of a reaction to delete the whole site.
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fuzzfactor 2y ago
>the Online Safety Act was supposed to hold big tech to account, but in fact they're the only ones who will be able to comply... it consolidates more on those platforms. This says it so well, acknowledging the work of a misguided bureaucracy. Looks like it now requires an online community to have its own bureaucracy in place, to preemptively stand by ready to effectively interact in new ways with a powerful, growing, long-established authoritarian government bureaucracy of overwhelming size and increasing overreach. Measures like this are promulgated in such a way that only large highly prosperous outfits beyond a certain size can justify maintaining readiness for their own bureaucracies to spring into action on a full-time basis with as much staff as necessary to compare to the scale of the government bureaucracy concerned, and as concerns may arise that mattered naught before. Especially when there are new open-ended provisions for unpredictable show-stoppers, now fiercely codified to the distinct disadvantage of so many non-bureaucrats just because they are online. If you think you are going to be able to rise to the occasion and dutifully establish your own embryonic bureaucracy for the first time to cope with this type unstable landscape, you are mistaken. It was already bad enough before without a newly imposed, bigger moving target than everything else combined :\ Nope, these type regulations only allow firms that already have a prominent well-funded bureaucracy of their own, on a full-time basis, long-established after growing in response to less-onerous mandates of the past. Anyone else who cannot just take this in stride without batting an eye, need not apply.
- IanCal 2y ago
  > Looks like it now requires an online community to have its own bureaucracy in place What do you mean by bureaucracy in this case? Doing the risk assessment?
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    Good question. I would say more like the prohibitive cost of compliance comes from the non-productive (or even anti-productive) nature of the activities needed to do so, as an ongoing basis. An initial risk assessment is a lot more of a fixed target with a goal that is in sight if not well within reach. Once it's behind you, it's possible to get back to putting more effort into productive actions. Assessments are often sprinted through so things can get "back to normal" ASAP, which can be worth it sometimes. Other times it's a world of hurt without paying attention to whether it's a moving goalpoast and the "sprint" might need to last forever. Which can also be coped with successfully, like dealing with large bureaucratic institutions as customers, since that's another time when you've got to have your own little bureaucracy. To be fully dedicated to the interaction and well-staffed enough for continuous 24/7 problem-solving operation at a moment's notice. If it's just a skeleton crew at a minimum they will have a stunted ability for teamwork since the most effective deployment can be more like a relay race, where each member must pull the complete weight, go the distance, not drop the baton, and pass it with finesse. While outrunning a pursuing horde and their support vehicles ;)
scotty79 2y ago
> The act only cares that is it "linked to the UK" (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users... that's it, that's the scope. So basically is this act a ban on indvidual communication through undermoderated platforms?
- throw16180339 2y ago
  It's a de facto ban on small forums.
batch12 2y ago
Has anyone offered to take these over for you?
idunnoman1222 2y ago
[flagged]
zulban 2y ago
I hope you've spoken to a good lawyer briefly to understand the practical realism of your legal fears. Understanding the legal system involves far more than just literally reading text.
- edgarvaldes 2y ago
  Maybe he did. Or maybe that is the first step in the very path that op doesnt want to walk.
  - zulban 2y ago
    Doing enough research to write this post tho is already more work than quickly calling a lawyer.
nprateem 2y ago
[flagged]
- latexr 2y ago
  Ah, yes, “just” run every comment from 275k users through an error prone system, while paying for every API call, to host something they already do at a loss.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - nprateem 2y ago
    Ah yes, "just" run every new comment through an AI system which costs peanuts for a binary response, and then covers them for having a moderation policy.
    - latexr 2y ago
      > which costs peanuts Peanuts aren’t free. Buying many peanuts adds up. And again, they are already operating at a loss. Additionally, it does not cover them when the system inevitably makes a mistake, especially considering that the OP’s fear is precisely that a disgruntled user would target them, meaning it would be a matter of time before someone would bypass the LLM.
      - nprateem 2y ago
        Bypassing, errors, etc is all process stuff that can be explained to authorities. And what do the cheap AI models cost, like $5 for a few million tokens? Hardly going to break the bank. Still an overreaction.
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sroussey 2y ago
I had a hosted forums for almost two decades, 4mm monthly users, etc, and can attest to the death threats and DDOS attempts (I was a very early customer of Cloudflare which basically saved us — thanks Matthew!) The stories… people get really personally invested in their online arguments and have all sorts of bad behavior that stems from it.
constantcrying 2y ago
It is pretty clear that many European countries, EU or not, do not want individuals hosting websites. Germany has quite strict rules regarding hosting, the EU has again and again proposed legislation that makes individuals hosting sites very hard and the UK doing similar things is no surprise. These governments only want institutions to host web services. Their rules are openly hostile to individuals. One obvious benefit is much tighter control, having a few companies with large, registered sites, gives the government control. It is also pretty clear that the public at large does not care. Most people are completely unaffected and rarely venture outside of the large, regulated platforms.
- Elucalidavah 2y ago
  > do not want individuals hosting websites It's more about "accepting and publishing arbitrary content". But, in practice, how hard is it to host a website anonymously? Or off-shore?
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    >But, in practice, how hard is it to host a website anonymously? Or off-shore? Obviously it is trivial, but so is shoplifting. Both are illegal and telling people to commit crimes is not helpful.
    - tryauuum 2y ago
      What's illegal in hosting a website anonymously? I don't even have to provide my personal info to register a domain name, I can run it on an IP-address
      - constantcrying 2y ago
        >What's illegal in hosting a website anonymously? In Germany it is straight up illegal. The UK law has provisions where a services has to name a responsible person or report specific things to the government. Obviously those can not be accomplished anonymously. In any case hosting a website anonymously doesn't work if you want to work within the law, any lawsuit against you will identify you. > I don't even have to provide my personal info to register a domain name, I can run it on an IP-address Which is totally irrelevant. I can also go into a store and take something without paying. The question is whether that is legal or not and what you need to do to keep it legal.
rsync 2y ago
Please allow us to gift you free-forever space at rsync.net to hold/stage this data - possibly in encrypted form - such that you can preserve what you have built. Just email us.
pcdoodle 2y ago
Can’t you just ip ban the offending country? UK sucks
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superkuh 2y ago
People seem to forget that the more legislation there is around something the more it is only feasible to do if you are a corporate person. Human persons just don't have the same rights or protections from liabilty.
- SteveNuts 2y ago
  It also raises the barrier to entry for newcomers, ensuring established large players continue to consolidate power, since they have the means to deflect and defend themselves from these regulations (unless there are specific carve-outs in place, of course).
  - morkalork 2y ago
    This effectively makes censorship much simpler for the government, no need to chase down a million little sites,just casually lean on the few big ones remaining.
    - SteveNuts 2y ago
      Skying too! Way fewer taps required.
- mattigames 2y ago
  It's not like there are laws that are more lenient with non-profits or with tiny companies right?
  - superkuh 2y ago
    The EU's digital markets act is one that got that right and I love it. But it's the exception to the rule. The vast majority of such laws are for the benefit of the corporations themselves, despite any ostensible purposes. And this is definitely in that latter category.
    - arlcode 2y ago
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> as a forum moderator you are known, and you are a target I want to emphasize just how true this is, in case anyone thinks this is hyperbole. I managed a pissant VBulletin forum, and moderated a pretty small subreddit. The former got me woken up at 2, 3, 4am with phone calls because someone got banned and was upset about it. The latter got me death threats from someone who lived in my neighborhood, knew approximately where I lived, and knew my full name. (Would they have gone beyond the tough-guy-words-online stage? Who knows. I didn't bother waiting to find out, and resigned as moderator immediately and publicly.)
- theshackleford 2y ago
  100% I used to run a moderately sized forum for a few years. Death threats, legal threats, had faeces mailed to my house, someone found out where I worked and started making harrasing calls/turning up to the office. I don't run a forum no more. For what I feel are obvious reasons.
  - speckx 2y ago
    I, too, can confirm all this. Way back in the day, I hosted a largish forum and moderated it. It grew to be a pain to moderate, and it became costly to run as well, in short, it was no longer fun like it was initially, and I walked away from it.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I used to be a moderator for the french forum OP mention in his post and helped maintain the previous website. I threw the towel long before they migrated to microcosm. I didn't even ask to be that moderator but ended up somehow when other "hired members" when they themselves tried to distance themselves from the moderation. It is so thankless. Some trolls were constantly making thread derails, were repeatedly banned but kept creating new accounts, joining other forums I was a simple member to stalk me and get more information in order to publish stuff about me or my family online.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I managed a pissant VBulletin forum, and ... got me woken up at 2, 3, 4am with phone calls because someone got banned and was upset about it. I home-hosted a minecraft server and was repeatedly DDoS'd. Don't underestimate disgruntled 10yo's.
baggy_trough 2y ago
The whole government page at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/time-for-tech-firms-to-act-uk-online-safety-regulation-comes-into-force/ https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c... has an off-putting and threatening tone, celebrating how wonderful it is that online spaces will be tied in bureaucratic knots. Disgraceful.
- alwa 2y ago
  The hacker in me is real grumpy about all this, and believes that they’re nannying a whole lot of the dumb superficial stuff while pushing serious malfeasance underground. But they make a good point: if you exclude the smaller providers, that’s where the drugs and CSAM and the freewheeling dialog go. Assuming it’s their policy goal to deter these categories of speech, I’m not sure how you do that without a net fine enough to scoop up the 4chans of the world too. It’s not the behavior of a confident, open, healthy society, though…
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    The cure is worse than the disease.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > if you exclude the smaller providers, that’s where the drugs and CSAM and the freewheeling dialog go. - Bad actors go everywhere now. - £18 million fines seem like a fairly unhinged cannon to aim at small webistes. - A baseless accusation is enough to trigger a risk of life-changing fines. Bad actors don't just sell drugs and freewheel; they also falsely accuse.
    - jimnotgym 2y ago
      18m maximum fine.
  - vorpalhex 2y ago
    As a quick cheatsheet, laws targeting CSAM are always just tools to go after other things. CSAM is absolutely horrible.. but CSAM laws don't stop CSAM (primarily this happens from group defections). Instead it's just a form of tarring, in this case unliked speech, by associating it with the most horrible thing anyone can think of.
draw_down 2y ago
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_fat_santa 2y ago
It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech". I feel like the whole time this was being argued and passed, everyone in power just considered the internet to be the major social media sites and never considered that a single person or smaller group will run a site. IMO I think that you're going to get two groups of poeple emerge from this. One group will just shut down their sites to avoid running a fowl of the rules and the other group will go the "go fuck yourself" route and continue to host anonymously.
- IanCal 2y ago
  > It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech". That would be insane, and it's not true. You have to consider the risks and impacts of your service, and scale is a key part of that. I think it's really important around this to actually talk about what's in the requirements, and if you think something that has gone through this much stuff is truly insane (rather than just a set of tradeoffs you're on the other side of) then it's worth asking if you have understood it. Maybe you have and lots of other people are extremely stupid, or maybe your understanding of it is off - if it's important to you in any way it probably makes sense to check right?
- InsomniacL 2y ago
  > It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech". There's only 13 provisions that apply to sites with less than 7 million users (10% of the UK population). 7 of those are basically having an inbox where people can make a complaint and there is a process to deal with complaints. 1 is having a 'report' button for users. 2 say you will provide a 'terms of service' 1 says you will remove accounts if you think they're run by terrorists. The OP is blowing this out of proportion.
  - creer 2y ago
    You are obviously rewriting a lot of the law, and ignoring that the penalty seems to still be "up to 18 million pounds". So no, there is a deliberate bias against smaller sites.
_fjg8 2y ago
I don't understand this decision. Running a website as an individual is a liability risk for all sorts of reasons for which there are simple (and cheap) mitigations. Even if you believe this legislation is a risk, there are options other than shutting down. The overreaction here is no different than when GDPR came in, and we all collectively lost our minds and started shutting things down and then discovered there was zero consequence for mom-and-pop websites. I assume this isn't a genuine post and is actually an attempt at some sort of protest, with no intention of actually shutting down the websites. Or, more likely, they're just old and tired and ready to move on from this period of their life, running these websites.
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  What are the simple and cheap mitigations you have in mind?
  - aimazon 2y ago
    Don't run a website personally, set up a separate legal entity. The UK is one of the easiest places in the world to do this and has well-understood legal entities that fit the model of a community-operated organisation (i.e: "community interest company"). The fact that the OP is running such a large community as an individual is bonkers in the first place, independent of this new act.
    - baggy_trough 2y ago
      Personally, I think it's bonkers that an individual can't run an online forum.
      - aimazon 2y ago
        I agree but that ship sailed a decade ago. There's no additional risk with the new bill, it's more of the same. If there are concerns about liability because of this new bill then there should be concerns about liability already. I sympathise with the OP because at some point everyone becomes too old to deal with the headaches of running a community. I have no opposition to their choice to shut down the forum. I just don't believe liability as a result of the new bill is the reason.
dom96 2y ago
None of this seems to describe exactly what the problem with this new act is. Can someone ELI5 what this new law does that means it's no longer safe to run your own forum?
- IanCal 2y ago
  https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/quick-guide-to-online-safety-risk-assessments/ https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c... You need to do a risk assessment and keep a copy. Depending on how risky things are, you need to put more mitigations in place. If you have a neighbourhood events thing that people can post to, and you haven't had complaints and generally keep an eye out for misuse, that's it. If you run a large scale chat room for kids with suicidal thoughts where unvetted adults can talk to them in DMs you're going to have a higher set of mitigations and things in place. Scale is important, but it's not the only determining factor. An example of low risk for suicide harm is > A large vertical search service specialised in travel searches, including for flights and hotels. It has around 10 million monthly UK users. It uses recommender systems, including for suggesting destinations. It has a basic user reporting system. There has never been any evidence or suggestion of illegal suicide content appearing in search results, and the provider can see no way in which this could ever happen. Even though it is a large service, the provider concludes it has negligible or no risk for the encouraging or assisting suicide offence An example for high risk of grooming is > A social media site has over 10 million monthly UK users. It allows direct messaging and has network expansion prompts. The terms of service say the service is only for people aged 16 and over. As well as a content reporting system, the service allows users to report and block other users. While in theory only those aged 16 and over are allowed to use the service, it does not use highly effective age assurance and it is known to be used by younger children. While the service has received few reports from users of grooming, external expert organisations have highlighted that it is known to be used for grooming. It has been named in various police cases and in a prominent newspaper investigation about grooming. The provider concludes the service is high risk for grooming
- KMnO4 2y ago
  From Wikipedia: > The act creates a new duty of care of online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal, or legal but "harmful", content from their users. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher.
alangibson 2y ago
The UK has just given up on being in any way internationally relevant. If the City of London financial district disappeared, within 10 years we'd all forget that it's still a country.
- Kenji 2y ago
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- observationist 2y ago
  How much damage can they withstand before they figure out how to stop hurting themselves? I wouldn't touch UK investment with a ten foot pole.
  - throw646577 2y ago
    > How much damage can they withstand before they figure out how to stop hurting themselves? Funnily enough we wonder this about the USA and its drain-circling obsession with giving power -- and now grotesque, performative preemptive obeisance -- to Donald Trump.
  - intunderflow 2y ago
    A lot more, the Online Safety Act is just a symptom of the structural problems (Lack of de-facto governance, A hopelessly out of touch political class, Voting systems that intentionally don't represent the voting results, etc). Argentina has had nearly 100 years of decline, Japan is onto its third lost decade. The only other party in the UK that has a chance of being elected (because of the voting system) is lead by someone who thinks sandwiches are not real [1]. It's entirely possible the UK doesn't become a serious country in our lifetimes. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-tory-leader-sandwiches-not-real-kemi-badenoch/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-tory-leader-sandwiches-no...
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      She doesn't think sandwiches aren't real. It was just a point about not liking them. The current actual leader of the UK decided to politicise this, in a real moist bread response: > Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who leads a country grappling with a stagnant economy, straining public services and multiple crises abroad — in turn accused Badenoch of talking down a “Great British institution.”
bogwog 2y ago
> this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs... and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour I'm a little confused about this part. Does the Online Safety Act create personal liabilities for site operators (EDIT: to clarify: would a corporation not be sufficient protection)? Or are they referring to harassment they'd receive from disgruntled users? Also, this is the first I've heard of Microcosm. It looks like some nice forum software and one I maybe would've considered for future projects. Shame to see it go.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago
  I think OP feels it indirectly creates massive personal liabilities for site operators, in that a user can deliberately upload illegal material and then report the site under the Act, opening the site operator up to £18M in fines. This seems very plausible to me, given what they and other moderators have said about the lengths some people will go to online when they feel antagonised.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    The rules aren't "never have bad things on your site" though. The example of "medium risk" for CSAM urls is a site with 8M users that has actively had CSAM shared on it before multiple times, been told this by multiple international organisations and has no checking on the content. It's a medium risk of it happening again.
  - jimnotgym 2y ago
    Again, sounds like the nonsense spoken on here when GDPR came out. Everyone was going to get fined millions. Except people with violations actually got compliance advice from the ICO. They only got fined (a small amount of money) when they totally ignored the ICO
    - arresin 2y ago
      Have you looked at a list of GDPR fines? The are small time people getting hit with ridiculous sums (not millions but still egregious).
MarkusWandel 2y ago
Is there some generalized law (yet) about unintended consequences? For example: Increase fuel economy -> Introduce fuel economy standards -> Economic cars practically phased out in favour of guzzling "trucks" that are exempt from fuel economy standards -> Worse fuel economy. or Protect the children -> Criminalize activites that might in any way cause an increase in risk to children -> Best to just keep them indoors playing with electronic gadgets -> Increased rates of obesity/depression etc -> Children worse off. As the article itself says: Hold big tech accountable -> Introduce rules so hard to comply with that only big tech will be able to comply -> Big tech goes on, but indie tech forced offline.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  I don't think anyone believe that the "think of the children" argument leads to "unintended" consequences. They are thoroughly intended. It doesn't look like that, but policy makers do analyze potential impact and this is a problem you understand if you are more than 5 minutes into the topic. Although I do think they overlook that their legislation is restricted to their domestic market though, so any potential positive effect is more or less immediately negated. That is especially true for English speaking countries.
- pyrale 2y ago
  Your first example is a case of lawmakers not willing to finish the job moreso than of regulation being bad. That is like saying "when we write software there are bugs, so rather than fix them, we should never write software again". Your second example is ascribing to regulation something that goes way beyond regulation.
  - npstr 2y ago
    No, what he says is "when we write software there are bugs, so we should write less software".
    - pyrale 2y ago
      As opposed to "we should fix the bugs we find".
fjgf 2y ago
Might the author be overreacting a bit to this new law? As I understand it, it doesn't put that much of an onerous demand on forum operators. Then again, maybe he's just burnt out from running these sites and this was the final straw. I can understand if he wants to pack it in after so long, and this is as good reason as any to call it a day. Though, has no-one in that community offered to take over? Forums do change hands now and then.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >Might the author be overreacting a bit to this new law? How much money should he spend on a lawyer to figure this out for him? Would you be willing to risk personal liability for your interpretation of this law? Obviously I would not.
  - ArchOversight 2y ago
    Author uses they/them pronouns.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      Who asked?
- ArchOversight 2y ago
  Op uses they/them pronouns.
  - fjgf 2y ago
    Thanks but I don't share the choose-your-own-pronouns beliefs involved in this, as these are built upon sexism.
- NilMostChill 2y ago
  > Might the author be overreacting a bit to this new law As i have read it, no, it's worth a read to see for yourself though. > it doesn't put that much of an onerous demand on forum operators. It doesn't until it does, the issue is the massive amount of work needed to cover the "what if?". It's not clear that it doesn't apply and so it will be abused, that's how the internet works, DMCA, youtube strikes, domain strikes etc. > Then again, maybe he's just burnt out from running these sites and this was the final straw. I can understand if he wants to pack it in after so long, and this is as good reason as any to call it a day. Possibly, worth asking. > Though, has no-one in that community offered to take over? Forums do change hands now and then. Someone else taking over doesn't remove the problem, though there might be someone willing to assume the risk.
jdsnape 2y ago
I did a double take when I saw this here. I’ve lurked on LFGSS, posted from time to time and bought things through it. Genuinely one of the best online communities I’ve been in, and the best cycling adjacent one by far. Having said all that, I can’t criticise the decision. It makes me sad to see it and it feels like the end of an era online
- angled 2y ago
  Just like our knees… we might have started as fg, but now ss, and soon our Phils will not be laced for the track but for our chairs. The fight is fading.
tracker1 2y ago
Okay, I'm putting up a new bbs in the US that is only going to be accessible via SSH modern terminal only... UK users will be more than welcome. I've been wanting to pay with remote modern terminals and Ratatui anyway.
- anthk 2y ago
  Or just use a news server and create a tilde with gopher/irc and so on, then federate it with the tildeverse.
deleted 2y ago
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owisd 2y ago
The actual OfCom code of practice is here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/illegal-content-codes-of-practice-for-user-to-user-services.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... A cycling site with 275k MAU would be in the very lowest category where compliance is things like 'having a content moderation function to review and assess suspected illegal content'. So having a report button.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  If only more people actually read the actual documents in context (same with GDPR), but the tech world has low legal literacy
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    Expecting people to read and correctly interpret complex legal documents is absurd. Obviously any lay person is heavily dissuaded by that. I would never except personal liability for my correct interpretation of the GDPR. I would be extremely dumb if I did.
- xdennis 2y ago
  > having a content moderation function to review and assess suspected illegal content That costs money. The average person can't know every law. You have to hire lawyers to adjudicate every report or otherwise assess every report as illegal. No one is going to do that for free if the penalty for being wrong is being thrown in prison. A fair system would be to send every report of illegal content to a judge to check if it's illegal or not. If it is the post is taken down and the prosecution starts. But that would cost the country an enormous amount of money. So instead the cost is passed to the operators. Which in effect means only the richest or riskiest sites can afford to continue to operate.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  This isn't how laws work. If you give a layperson a large law and tell him that, if he is in violation, he has to pay millions, then it pretty much doesn't matter that there is some way where, with some effort, he can comply. Most people aren't lawyers and figuring out how to actually comply with this is incredibly tedious and risky, as he is personally liable for any mistakes he makes interpreting those laws. Companies have legal departments, which exist to figure out answers to questions like that. This is because these questions are extremely tricky and the answers might even change as case law trickles in or rules get revised. Expecting individuals to interpret complex rulesets under threat of legal liability is a very good way to make sure these people stop what they are doing.
edm0nd 2y ago
[flagged]
- tyushk 2y ago
  > Block UK users The site is primarily focused on London/UK biking enthusiasts. > Make a forum that is only for UK users That is the forum for UK users. > Just ignore the law and fight it The linked post mentions that the fines for failure to comply start at £18 million. I'd understand not wanting to take that risk. > Setup the forums on bulletproof hosting which ignore such silly laws. I think this is the most viable strategy, but even then the site owner incurs risks through ie. ownership of the domain or considerable participation.
  - crtasm 2y ago
    £18m is a maximum, not a minimum, but your point stands.
kragen 2y ago
That's terrible. Hopefully the users can make backups (of at least what has already been posted, if not of their ongoing social connections) before the shutdown. It's good that you can provide such notice. Are you providing tarballs?
setgree 2y ago
An insightful comment on this from an American context, but about basically the same problem [0] > Read the regs and you can absolutely see how complying with them to allow for banana peeling could become prohibitively costly. But the debate of whether they are pro-fruit or anti-fruit misses the point. If daycares end up serving bags of chips instead of bananas, that’s the impact they’ve had. Maybe you could blame all sorts of folks for misinterpreting the regs, or applying them too strictly, or maybe you couldn’t. It doesn’t matter. This happens all the time in government, where policy makers and policy enforcers insist that the negative effects of the words they write don’t matter because that’s not how they intended them. > I’m sorry, but they do matter. In fact, the impact – separate from the intent – is all that really matters. [0] https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-theyre https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-the...
- missinglugnut 2y ago
  That's an excellent article. Another quote I found especially relevant: >Every step that law takes down the enormous hierarchy of bureaucracy, the incentives for the public servants who operationalize it is to take a more literal, less flexible interpretation. By the time the daycare worker interacts with it, the effect of the law is often at odds with lawmakers’ intent. Put another way, everyone in the chain is incentivized to be very risk averse when faced with a vague regulation, and this risk aversion can compound to reach absurd places.
greener_grass 2y ago
Are you Velocio? Thanks for all the hard work! Sad that lufguss will probably become just another channel on one of the big platforms. RIP.
- buro9 2y ago
  yup, and thank you for the kind words
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    I wonder how much of the risk could be mitigated by simply disabling the private message function of microcosm? Surely having reports button help moderating the "public facing part" of a forum? Having said that, thanks for all the work you have done. I was (and maybe still am) a member of lfgss although I mostly lurked once in a long while without logging in and barely commented over the years. It is sad to see all online communities slowly migrate to discord, reddit and other walled gardens.
cakealert 2y ago
This seems like a classic "Don't interrupt your adversary when they are making a mistake" situation. The EU and UK have been making these anti-tech, anti-freedom moves for years. Nothing can be better if you are from the US. Just hoover up talent from their continent.
- sunshowers 2y ago
  Have you seen how difficult US immigration is to navigate? It's impossible for most people, and about to get even harder soon. Even if US immigration were more liberal, moving is very costly (financially, emotionally, psychologically). Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
webspinner 2y ago
This is what bad legislation does, punish small communities!
okasaki 2y ago
Why not hand it over to someone else who would take the risk? Seems a bit megalomaniacal. "I'm not interested in doing this any more. Therefore I'll shut it down for everyone"
- wccrawford 2y ago
  Because then they're responsible, at least socially, for the things the new admin does. This way, people have been given plenty of advanced notice and can start their own forums somewhere instead. I'm sure each of the 300 subforums already has some people running them, and they could do the above if they actually cared. I find it hard to believe someone will take over 300 forums out of the goodness of their hearts and not start making it worse eventually, if not immediately.
  - throw646577 2y ago
    > Because then they're responsible, at least socially, for the things the new admin does. Nonsense.
    - wccrawford 2y ago
      If you hand someone a ton of power and they abuse it, you can expect, at the very least, the people affected by that abuse to blame you for handing it to the wrong person. And since social media works the way it does, you can also expect a ton of unaffected people to also pick up their pitchforks and join in without having any real clue what's going on. And that's assuming there isn't some law somewhere that really does put you on the hook for it. 300 forums is a lot of power. It makes a lot more sense to expect the sub-admins of those forums to start their own communities elsewhere than for just hand power to a single person over all of them.
      - throw646577 2y ago
        > 300 forums is a lot of power. Yes, that's possibly 100 middle-aged men you could urge into battle!
jimnotgym 2y ago
Does everyone else remember when GDPR came out and everyone running a website was extradited to Europe and fined a billion pounds.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
Please consider working with Archive Team and/or the Internet Archive to preserve the content of the site.
- pabs3 2y ago
  FTR, the admin is now talking to ArchiveTeam and is willing to help reduce barriers to archiving the site to IA. For eg removing rate limits, allow-listing AT user-agents etc.
- kurisufag 2y ago
  you don't need archiveteam to save databases you already have. just dump the PII columns and put 'em up for torrent.
  - labster 2y ago
    I’m not a lawyer but I wouldn’t recommend posting a dump of the PII columns lol
    - kurisufag 2y ago
      goddamn the English language
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
    I'd argue that despite technically being higher fidelity, the SQL dump is less useful than the archive team style http request dump, because the latter fits into the Wayback Machine while the former would require extra steps to meaningfully access the data. (Unless of course someone is resurrecting the site)
    - pabs3 2y ago
      Usually ArchiveTeam will do both where we can. For example we do wikis that are shutting down with both ArchiveBot (recursively download the site, saving in WARC format and uploading to web.archive.org) and Wikibot (download MediaWiki/DokuWiki source text exports in a way that can be restored later, upload to archive.org). https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Wikibot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Wikibot
schappim 2y ago
We have something similar in Australia with the Online Safety Act 2021. I think this highlights a critical misunderstanding at the heart of the legislation: it imagines the internet as a handful of giant platforms rather than a rich tapestry of independent, community-driven spaces. The Online Safety Act’s broad, vague requirements and potential penalties are trivial hurdles for billion-dollar companies with in-house legal teams, compliance departments, and automatic moderation tooling. But for a single individual running a forum as a labour of love—or a small collective operating on volunteer time—this creates a legal minefield where any disgruntled user can threaten real financial and personal harm. In practice, this means the local cycling forum that fostered trust, friendship, and even mental health support is at risk of vanishing, while the megacorps sail on without a scratch. Ironically, a measure allegedly designed to rein in “Big Tech” ends up discouraging small, independent communities and pushing users toward the same large platforms the legislation was supposedly targeting. It’s discouraging to watch governments double down on complex, top-down solutions that ignore the cultural and social value of these smaller spaces. We need policy that recognises genuine community-led forums as a public good, encourages sustainable moderation practices, and holds bad actors accountable without strangling the grassroots projects that make the internet more human. Instead, this act risks hollowing out our online diversity, leaving behind a more homogenised, corporate-dominated landscape.
- paranoidrobot 2y ago
  > We have something similar in Australia with the Online Safety Act 2021. That wasn't the one I was thinking of, to be honest. I'd have thought you would be mentioning the latest ball of WTF: "Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024". According to the bill, HN needs to identify all Australian users to prevent under-16's from using it. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/bd/bd2425/25bd39 https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
  - snibsnib 2y ago
    That bill is an amendment to the aforementioned act. But yes, I'm confused as to whether it applies to online gaming, or sites such as wikipedia as well
reaperducer 2y ago
I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users I can't imagine one person running over 300 forums with 275,000 active users. That gives you an average of eight minutes a week to tend to the needs of each one. I used to run a single forum with 50,000 active users, and even putting 20 hours a week into it, I still didn't give it everything it needed. I know someone currently running a forum with about 20,000 active users and it's a full-time job for him. I don't understand how it's possible for one person to run 300 forums well.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  He is running the infra and maintain the code. Each of those forums have their own moderators. They are basically his customers. I think what he fears is he has no control on how these individual forums moderate their content and how liable he would be as the hosting admin.
  - ArchOversight 2y ago
    Op uses they/them pronouns.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      Sorry, genuine mistake. I haven't seen mention of their pronouns.
- squigz 2y ago
  With 1 or 2 competent mods, a forum can be very low-maintenance.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    When I was running the 50,000 user forum, I had five. Mods are great, but I still can't grok 300+ forums all being done well. He'd need hundreds of mods.
beacon294 2y ago
It's much more responsible to put this whole thing into some nonprofit trust format and hand it over to someone with the time and energy to handle it. This also would not exclude you from volunteering.
- dspillett 2y ago
  I can understand them not wanting the due diligence burden (even if only self-imposed rather than required for any official reason) of picking a successor in this way, or the admin burden of setting up “some non-profit trust format”. Also depending on the terms agreed to when people signed on and started posting, it might be legally or morally difficult because transferring the data to the control of another party could be against the letter or the spirit of the terms users agreed to. Probably not, but I wouldn't want to wave such potential concerns off as “nah, it'll be fine” and hoping for the best. Even leaving a read-only version up, so a new home could develop with the old content remaining for reference, isn't risk free: the virtual-swatting risk that people are concerned about with this regulation would be an issue for archived content as much as live stuff. At least people have a full three months notice. Maybe in that time someone can come up with a transfer and continuation plan the current maintainer is happy with, if not the users at least have some time to try to move any social connectivity based around the site elsewhere.
  - beacon294 2y ago
    I did say it's more responsible, which I get is a values judgment.
janniehater 2y ago
[dead]
jimnotgym 2y ago
The laughable thing is believing that Ofcom has any budget to prosecute anyone, let alone a small website.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>Any monies donated in excess of what is needed to provide the service through to 16th March 2025 will be spent personally on unnecessary bike gear or astrophotography equipment, but more likely on my transition costs as being transfemme I can tell you there is zero NHS support and I'm busy doing everything DIY (reminder to myself, need to go buy some blood tests so I can guess my next dosage change)... Not that I imagine there will be an excess, but hey, I must be clear about what would happen if there were an excess. I would argue the honorable thing to do in the event excess monies remain would be to donate it to a charity. Using it for personal ends, whatever the details, is wrong because that's not what the donations were for.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Welcome to British humour, and - it's spelled correctly.
soulofmischief 2y ago
Have you considered handing off the forums to someone based outside of the UK? I'm sure you might be able to find a reasonable steward and divest without leaving your users stranded. You've worked very hard and have something to be proud of, I would hate to see it go.
- dutchbrit 2y ago
  "The Act applies to services even if the companies providing them are outside the UK should they have links to the UK. This includes if the service has a significant number of UK users"
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    >"...This includes if the service has a significant number of UK users". "[A] significant number"? How Britishly vague. There was one person involved in the doompf of that ceo guy.... I would say that a significant-sized football crowd would be over 75,000. That's a lot of numbers that 'significant', has to lean on.
    - IanCal 2y ago
      > The subsection headed ‘User numbers’ (which begins at paragraph 5.7) explains when a service is to be treated as having more than a particular number of monthly active United Kingdom users for those measures which apply in relation to services of a certain size, and how to calculate the number of monthly active United Kingdom users. The definition of ‘large service’ is included in the definitions section in Section 5 of this document. That section details how to calculate the figures, because they're relevant for sections like CSAM scanning > Services that are at high risk of imagebased CSAM and (a) have more than 700,000 monthly active United Kingdom users or (b) are file-storage and file-sharing services.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    This is gonna sound crazy, but you can potentially just ignore unjust laws in countries like the UK if you don't live there. At your own risk of course, but that is the nature of protest. If OP divests completely then it should be out of his hands.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
I'm ignoring the comments, they seem to be all about the posters themselves. I have no knowledge of your site, but I'm still sad to see it having to shut down.
Vriska1 2y ago
Hopefully you guys can somehow fight this, Have you contacted any big news sites about this? Also I think its likely there going to be alot of Judicial reviews and legal challenges to this. I don't see how this will hold up under the ECHR.
Dambalala 2y ago
Sad news. I enjoy LFGSS a lot. Thank you for your work.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
What we need is some entity setup in the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, anywhere that is outside of where this law will matter. Sites turned over locals, legally and in other ways. The thing though is how to finance it and how to provide stewardship for the sites going forward. Running sites like this post is about is not profitable. Nor is it too resource intensive.
bluedino 2y ago
In addition to the cookie privacy pop-over when viewing that site, I (as an American) am just amazed how regulated the internet is in Europe compared to the USA. Is there an argument why we would want it any other way?
- buro9 2y ago
  > In addition to the cookie privacy pop-over when viewing that site I don't know where you're seeing that as the site does not have such things. The only cookies present are essential and so nothing further was needed. The site does not track you, sell your data, or otherwise test you as a source of monetisation. Without such things conforming with cookie laws is trivial... You are conformant by just connecting nothing that isn't essential to providing the service. For most of the sites only a single cookie is set for the session, and for the few via cloudflare those cookies get set too.
- tempestn 2y ago
  Why we would want it any other way than what? It's not clear to me whether you see the added European regulation as positive or negative.
1cool 2y ago
as a lurker here and at lfgss, just wanted to say lfgss exposed me to so much that i'm thankful for (not only fg/ss but also in cycling culture + more) so thanks for all that buro9! <3

798 points by buro9 2y ago

agnishom 2y ago

Remember when Omegle shut down recently? https://web.archive.org/web/20231109003559/https://omegle.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231109003559/https://omegle.co... It seems that some people are convinced that the benefits of having strangers interact with each other are not worth the costs. I certainly disagree.

immibis 2y ago
Omegle was widely known to be full of underage children and overage child sexual predators. If I designed a site for 14-year-old girls to sext with 30-year-old men it would be rightfully shut down. If I designed a site as a fun chat site but becomes in actual reality it became a sexting site for 14-year-old girls with adult men, should it be shut down?
- deleted 2y ago
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wkat4242 2y ago

I'm really sad this stuff is happening. For me the hobby sites are by far the best part of the internet. All the commercial stuff gets enshittified. I hardly use any commercial social media or forums anymore. I don't believe this kind of regulation will do anything but put the real criminals more underground while killing all these helpful community initiatives. It's just window dressing for electoral purposes.

mrx007 2y ago

I'm wondering, would putting the forum behind auth wall 'solve' this 'problem'? Forum users already have accounts, and make it not too difficult for new users to sign up.. Otherwise content would be not accessible to unauthed users. Or another thought, distribute it only through VPN, OpenVPN can be installed on mobiles these days (I have one installed on my Android). Make keys creation part of registration process.

Separo 2y ago

I haven't read the act and am not going to, but, for this size community I'm pretty sure having a flag/report button would do the trick, and to go the extra mile, with very cheap LLM's generating a "dodgy content" score on every message would be pretty trivial. This seems a bit knee-jerk of a reaction to delete the whole site.

deleted 2y ago

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fuzzfactor 2y ago

>the Online Safety Act was supposed to hold big tech to account, but in fact they're the only ones who will be able to comply... it consolidates more on those platforms. This says it so well, acknowledging the work of a misguided bureaucracy. Looks like it now requires an online community to have its own bureaucracy in place, to preemptively stand by ready to effectively interact in new ways with a powerful, growing, long-established authoritarian government bureaucracy of overwhelming size and increasing overreach. Measures like this are promulgated in such a way that only large highly prosperous outfits beyond a certain size can justify maintaining readiness for their own bureaucracies to spring into action on a full-time basis with as much staff as necessary to compare to the scale of the government bureaucracy concerned, and as concerns may arise that mattered naught before. Especially when there are new open-ended provisions for unpredictable show-stoppers, now fiercely codified to the distinct disadvantage of so many non-bureaucrats just because they are online. If you think you are going to be able to rise to the occasion and dutifully establish your own embryonic bureaucracy for the first time to cope with this type unstable landscape, you are mistaken. It was already bad enough before without a newly imposed, bigger moving target than everything else combined :\ Nope, these type regulations only allow firms that already have a prominent well-funded bureaucracy of their own, on a full-time basis, long-established after growing in response to less-onerous mandates of the past. Anyone else who cannot just take this in stride without batting an eye, need not apply.

IanCal 2y ago
> Looks like it now requires an online community to have its own bureaucracy in place What do you mean by bureaucracy in this case? Doing the risk assessment?
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  Good question. I would say more like the prohibitive cost of compliance comes from the non-productive (or even anti-productive) nature of the activities needed to do so, as an ongoing basis. An initial risk assessment is a lot more of a fixed target with a goal that is in sight if not well within reach. Once it's behind you, it's possible to get back to putting more effort into productive actions. Assessments are often sprinted through so things can get "back to normal" ASAP, which can be worth it sometimes. Other times it's a world of hurt without paying attention to whether it's a moving goalpoast and the "sprint" might need to last forever. Which can also be coped with successfully, like dealing with large bureaucratic institutions as customers, since that's another time when you've got to have your own little bureaucracy. To be fully dedicated to the interaction and well-staffed enough for continuous 24/7 problem-solving operation at a moment's notice. If it's just a skeleton crew at a minimum they will have a stunted ability for teamwork since the most effective deployment can be more like a relay race, where each member must pull the complete weight, go the distance, not drop the baton, and pass it with finesse. While outrunning a pursuing horde and their support vehicles ;)

scotty79 2y ago

> The act only cares that is it "linked to the UK" (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users... that's it, that's the scope. So basically is this act a ban on indvidual communication through undermoderated platforms?

throw16180339 2y ago
It's a de facto ban on small forums.

batch12 2y ago

Has anyone offered to take these over for you?

idunnoman1222 2y ago

[flagged]

zulban 2y ago

I hope you've spoken to a good lawyer briefly to understand the practical realism of your legal fears. Understanding the legal system involves far more than just literally reading text.

edgarvaldes 2y ago
Maybe he did. Or maybe that is the first step in the very path that op doesnt want to walk.
- zulban 2y ago
  Doing enough research to write this post tho is already more work than quickly calling a lawyer.

nprateem 2y ago

[flagged]

latexr 2y ago
Ah, yes, “just” run every comment from 275k users through an error prone system, while paying for every API call, to host something they already do at a loss.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nprateem 2y ago
  Ah yes, "just" run every new comment through an AI system which costs peanuts for a binary response, and then covers them for having a moderation policy.
  - latexr 2y ago
    > which costs peanuts Peanuts aren’t free. Buying many peanuts adds up. And again, they are already operating at a loss. Additionally, it does not cover them when the system inevitably makes a mistake, especially considering that the OP’s fear is precisely that a disgruntled user would target them, meaning it would be a matter of time before someone would bypass the LLM.
    - nprateem 2y ago
      Bypassing, errors, etc is all process stuff that can be explained to authorities. And what do the cheap AI models cost, like $5 for a few million tokens? Hardly going to break the bank. Still an overreaction.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sroussey 2y ago

I had a hosted forums for almost two decades, 4mm monthly users, etc, and can attest to the death threats and DDOS attempts (I was a very early customer of Cloudflare which basically saved us — thanks Matthew!) The stories… people get really personally invested in their online arguments and have all sorts of bad behavior that stems from it.

constantcrying 2y ago

It is pretty clear that many European countries, EU or not, do not want individuals hosting websites. Germany has quite strict rules regarding hosting, the EU has again and again proposed legislation that makes individuals hosting sites very hard and the UK doing similar things is no surprise. These governments only want institutions to host web services. Their rules are openly hostile to individuals. One obvious benefit is much tighter control, having a few companies with large, registered sites, gives the government control. It is also pretty clear that the public at large does not care. Most people are completely unaffected and rarely venture outside of the large, regulated platforms.

Elucalidavah 2y ago
> do not want individuals hosting websites It's more about "accepting and publishing arbitrary content". But, in practice, how hard is it to host a website anonymously? Or off-shore?
- constantcrying 2y ago
  >But, in practice, how hard is it to host a website anonymously? Or off-shore? Obviously it is trivial, but so is shoplifting. Both are illegal and telling people to commit crimes is not helpful.
  - tryauuum 2y ago
    What's illegal in hosting a website anonymously? I don't even have to provide my personal info to register a domain name, I can run it on an IP-address
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      >What's illegal in hosting a website anonymously? In Germany it is straight up illegal. The UK law has provisions where a services has to name a responsible person or report specific things to the government. Obviously those can not be accomplished anonymously. In any case hosting a website anonymously doesn't work if you want to work within the law, any lawsuit against you will identify you. > I don't even have to provide my personal info to register a domain name, I can run it on an IP-address Which is totally irrelevant. I can also go into a store and take something without paying. The question is whether that is legal or not and what you need to do to keep it legal.

rsync 2y ago

Please allow us to gift you free-forever space at rsync.net to hold/stage this data - possibly in encrypted form - such that you can preserve what you have built. Just email us.

pcdoodle 2y ago

Can’t you just ip ban the offending country? UK sucks

deleted 2y ago

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superkuh 2y ago

People seem to forget that the more legislation there is around something the more it is only feasible to do if you are a corporate person. Human persons just don't have the same rights or protections from liabilty.

SteveNuts 2y ago
It also raises the barrier to entry for newcomers, ensuring established large players continue to consolidate power, since they have the means to deflect and defend themselves from these regulations (unless there are specific carve-outs in place, of course).
- morkalork 2y ago
  This effectively makes censorship much simpler for the government, no need to chase down a million little sites,just casually lean on the few big ones remaining.
  - SteveNuts 2y ago
    Skying too! Way fewer taps required.
mattigames 2y ago
It's not like there are laws that are more lenient with non-profits or with tiny companies right?
- superkuh 2y ago
  The EU's digital markets act is one that got that right and I love it. But it's the exception to the rule. The vast majority of such laws are for the benefit of the corporations themselves, despite any ostensible purposes. And this is definitely in that latter category.
  - arlcode 2y ago

pavel_lishin 2y ago

> as a forum moderator you are known, and you are a target I want to emphasize just how true this is, in case anyone thinks this is hyperbole. I managed a pissant VBulletin forum, and moderated a pretty small subreddit. The former got me woken up at 2, 3, 4am with phone calls because someone got banned and was upset about it. The latter got me death threats from someone who lived in my neighborhood, knew approximately where I lived, and knew my full name. (Would they have gone beyond the tough-guy-words-online stage? Who knows. I didn't bother waiting to find out, and resigned as moderator immediately and publicly.)

theshackleford 2y ago
100% I used to run a moderately sized forum for a few years. Death threats, legal threats, had faeces mailed to my house, someone found out where I worked and started making harrasing calls/turning up to the office. I don't run a forum no more. For what I feel are obvious reasons.
- speckx 2y ago
  I, too, can confirm all this. Way back in the day, I hosted a largish forum and moderated it. It grew to be a pain to moderate, and it became costly to run as well, in short, it was no longer fun like it was initially, and I walked away from it.
prmoustache 2y ago
I used to be a moderator for the french forum OP mention in his post and helped maintain the previous website. I threw the towel long before they migrated to microcosm. I didn't even ask to be that moderator but ended up somehow when other "hired members" when they themselves tried to distance themselves from the moderation. It is so thankless. Some trolls were constantly making thread derails, were repeatedly banned but kept creating new accounts, joining other forums I was a simple member to stalk me and get more information in order to publish stuff about me or my family online.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I managed a pissant VBulletin forum, and ... got me woken up at 2, 3, 4am with phone calls because someone got banned and was upset about it. I home-hosted a minecraft server and was repeatedly DDoS'd. Don't underestimate disgruntled 10yo's.

baggy_trough 2y ago

The whole government page at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/time-for-tech-firms-to-act-uk-online-safety-regulation-comes-into-force/ https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c... has an off-putting and threatening tone, celebrating how wonderful it is that online spaces will be tied in bureaucratic knots. Disgraceful.

alwa 2y ago
The hacker in me is real grumpy about all this, and believes that they’re nannying a whole lot of the dumb superficial stuff while pushing serious malfeasance underground. But they make a good point: if you exclude the smaller providers, that’s where the drugs and CSAM and the freewheeling dialog go. Assuming it’s their policy goal to deter these categories of speech, I’m not sure how you do that without a net fine enough to scoop up the 4chans of the world too. It’s not the behavior of a confident, open, healthy society, though…
- baggy_trough 2y ago
  The cure is worse than the disease.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > if you exclude the smaller providers, that’s where the drugs and CSAM and the freewheeling dialog go. - Bad actors go everywhere now. - £18 million fines seem like a fairly unhinged cannon to aim at small webistes. - A baseless accusation is enough to trigger a risk of life-changing fines. Bad actors don't just sell drugs and freewheel; they also falsely accuse.
  - jimnotgym 2y ago
    18m maximum fine.
- vorpalhex 2y ago
  As a quick cheatsheet, laws targeting CSAM are always just tools to go after other things. CSAM is absolutely horrible.. but CSAM laws don't stop CSAM (primarily this happens from group defections). Instead it's just a form of tarring, in this case unliked speech, by associating it with the most horrible thing anyone can think of.

draw_down 2y ago

[dead]

_fat_santa 2y ago

It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech". I feel like the whole time this was being argued and passed, everyone in power just considered the internet to be the major social media sites and never considered that a single person or smaller group will run a site. IMO I think that you're going to get two groups of poeple emerge from this. One group will just shut down their sites to avoid running a fowl of the rules and the other group will go the "go fuck yourself" route and continue to host anonymously.

IanCal 2y ago
> It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech". That would be insane, and it's not true. You have to consider the risks and impacts of your service, and scale is a key part of that. I think it's really important around this to actually talk about what's in the requirements, and if you think something that has gone through this much stuff is truly insane (rather than just a set of tradeoffs you're on the other side of) then it's worth asking if you have understood it. Maybe you have and lots of other people are extremely stupid, or maybe your understanding of it is off - if it's important to you in any way it probably makes sense to check right?
InsomniacL 2y ago
> It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech". There's only 13 provisions that apply to sites with less than 7 million users (10% of the UK population). 7 of those are basically having an inbox where people can make a complaint and there is a process to deal with complaints. 1 is having a 'report' button for users. 2 say you will provide a 'terms of service' 1 says you will remove accounts if you think they're run by terrorists. The OP is blowing this out of proportion.
- creer 2y ago
  You are obviously rewriting a lot of the law, and ignoring that the penalty seems to still be "up to 18 million pounds". So no, there is a deliberate bias against smaller sites.

_fjg8 2y ago

I don't understand this decision. Running a website as an individual is a liability risk for all sorts of reasons for which there are simple (and cheap) mitigations. Even if you believe this legislation is a risk, there are options other than shutting down. The overreaction here is no different than when GDPR came in, and we all collectively lost our minds and started shutting things down and then discovered there was zero consequence for mom-and-pop websites. I assume this isn't a genuine post and is actually an attempt at some sort of protest, with no intention of actually shutting down the websites. Or, more likely, they're just old and tired and ready to move on from this period of their life, running these websites.

baggy_trough 2y ago
What are the simple and cheap mitigations you have in mind?
- aimazon 2y ago
  Don't run a website personally, set up a separate legal entity. The UK is one of the easiest places in the world to do this and has well-understood legal entities that fit the model of a community-operated organisation (i.e: "community interest company"). The fact that the OP is running such a large community as an individual is bonkers in the first place, independent of this new act.
  - baggy_trough 2y ago
    Personally, I think it's bonkers that an individual can't run an online forum.
    - aimazon 2y ago
      I agree but that ship sailed a decade ago. There's no additional risk with the new bill, it's more of the same. If there are concerns about liability because of this new bill then there should be concerns about liability already. I sympathise with the OP because at some point everyone becomes too old to deal with the headaches of running a community. I have no opposition to their choice to shut down the forum. I just don't believe liability as a result of the new bill is the reason.

dom96 2y ago

None of this seems to describe exactly what the problem with this new act is. Can someone ELI5 what this new law does that means it's no longer safe to run your own forum?

IanCal 2y ago
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/quick-guide-to-online-safety-risk-assessments/ https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c... You need to do a risk assessment and keep a copy. Depending on how risky things are, you need to put more mitigations in place. If you have a neighbourhood events thing that people can post to, and you haven't had complaints and generally keep an eye out for misuse, that's it. If you run a large scale chat room for kids with suicidal thoughts where unvetted adults can talk to them in DMs you're going to have a higher set of mitigations and things in place. Scale is important, but it's not the only determining factor. An example of low risk for suicide harm is > A large vertical search service specialised in travel searches, including for flights and hotels. It has around 10 million monthly UK users. It uses recommender systems, including for suggesting destinations. It has a basic user reporting system. There has never been any evidence or suggestion of illegal suicide content appearing in search results, and the provider can see no way in which this could ever happen. Even though it is a large service, the provider concludes it has negligible or no risk for the encouraging or assisting suicide offence An example for high risk of grooming is > A social media site has over 10 million monthly UK users. It allows direct messaging and has network expansion prompts. The terms of service say the service is only for people aged 16 and over. As well as a content reporting system, the service allows users to report and block other users. While in theory only those aged 16 and over are allowed to use the service, it does not use highly effective age assurance and it is known to be used by younger children. While the service has received few reports from users of grooming, external expert organisations have highlighted that it is known to be used for grooming. It has been named in various police cases and in a prominent newspaper investigation about grooming. The provider concludes the service is high risk for grooming
KMnO4 2y ago
From Wikipedia: > The act creates a new duty of care of online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal, or legal but "harmful", content from their users. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher.

alangibson 2y ago

The UK has just given up on being in any way internationally relevant. If the City of London financial district disappeared, within 10 years we'd all forget that it's still a country.

Kenji 2y ago
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observationist 2y ago
How much damage can they withstand before they figure out how to stop hurting themselves? I wouldn't touch UK investment with a ten foot pole.
- throw646577 2y ago
  > How much damage can they withstand before they figure out how to stop hurting themselves? Funnily enough we wonder this about the USA and its drain-circling obsession with giving power -- and now grotesque, performative preemptive obeisance -- to Donald Trump.
- intunderflow 2y ago
  A lot more, the Online Safety Act is just a symptom of the structural problems (Lack of de-facto governance, A hopelessly out of touch political class, Voting systems that intentionally don't represent the voting results, etc). Argentina has had nearly 100 years of decline, Japan is onto its third lost decade. The only other party in the UK that has a chance of being elected (because of the voting system) is lead by someone who thinks sandwiches are not real [1]. It's entirely possible the UK doesn't become a serious country in our lifetimes. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-tory-leader-sandwiches-not-real-kemi-badenoch/ https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-tory-leader-sandwiches-no...
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    She doesn't think sandwiches aren't real. It was just a point about not liking them. The current actual leader of the UK decided to politicise this, in a real moist bread response: > Prime Minister Keir Starmer — who leads a country grappling with a stagnant economy, straining public services and multiple crises abroad — in turn accused Badenoch of talking down a “Great British institution.”

bogwog 2y ago

> this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs... and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour I'm a little confused about this part. Does the Online Safety Act create personal liabilities for site operators (EDIT: to clarify: would a corporation not be sufficient protection)? Or are they referring to harassment they'd receive from disgruntled users? Also, this is the first I've heard of Microcosm. It looks like some nice forum software and one I maybe would've considered for future projects. Shame to see it go.

akoboldfrying 2y ago
I think OP feels it indirectly creates massive personal liabilities for site operators, in that a user can deliberately upload illegal material and then report the site under the Act, opening the site operator up to £18M in fines. This seems very plausible to me, given what they and other moderators have said about the lengths some people will go to online when they feel antagonised.
- IanCal 2y ago
  The rules aren't "never have bad things on your site" though. The example of "medium risk" for CSAM urls is a site with 8M users that has actively had CSAM shared on it before multiple times, been told this by multiple international organisations and has no checking on the content. It's a medium risk of it happening again.
- jimnotgym 2y ago
  Again, sounds like the nonsense spoken on here when GDPR came out. Everyone was going to get fined millions. Except people with violations actually got compliance advice from the ICO. They only got fined (a small amount of money) when they totally ignored the ICO
  - arresin 2y ago
    Have you looked at a list of GDPR fines? The are small time people getting hit with ridiculous sums (not millions but still egregious).

MarkusWandel 2y ago

Is there some generalized law (yet) about unintended consequences? For example: Increase fuel economy -> Introduce fuel economy standards -> Economic cars practically phased out in favour of guzzling "trucks" that are exempt from fuel economy standards -> Worse fuel economy. or Protect the children -> Criminalize activites that might in any way cause an increase in risk to children -> Best to just keep them indoors playing with electronic gadgets -> Increased rates of obesity/depression etc -> Children worse off. As the article itself says: Hold big tech accountable -> Introduce rules so hard to comply with that only big tech will be able to comply -> Big tech goes on, but indie tech forced offline.

raxxorraxor 2y ago
I don't think anyone believe that the "think of the children" argument leads to "unintended" consequences. They are thoroughly intended. It doesn't look like that, but policy makers do analyze potential impact and this is a problem you understand if you are more than 5 minutes into the topic. Although I do think they overlook that their legislation is restricted to their domestic market though, so any potential positive effect is more or less immediately negated. That is especially true for English speaking countries.
pyrale 2y ago
Your first example is a case of lawmakers not willing to finish the job moreso than of regulation being bad. That is like saying "when we write software there are bugs, so rather than fix them, we should never write software again". Your second example is ascribing to regulation something that goes way beyond regulation.
- npstr 2y ago
  No, what he says is "when we write software there are bugs, so we should write less software".
  - pyrale 2y ago
    As opposed to "we should fix the bugs we find".

fjgf 2y ago

Might the author be overreacting a bit to this new law? As I understand it, it doesn't put that much of an onerous demand on forum operators. Then again, maybe he's just burnt out from running these sites and this was the final straw. I can understand if he wants to pack it in after so long, and this is as good reason as any to call it a day. Though, has no-one in that community offered to take over? Forums do change hands now and then.

constantcrying 2y ago
>Might the author be overreacting a bit to this new law? How much money should he spend on a lawyer to figure this out for him? Would you be willing to risk personal liability for your interpretation of this law? Obviously I would not.
- ArchOversight 2y ago
  Author uses they/them pronouns.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    Who asked?
ArchOversight 2y ago
Op uses they/them pronouns.
- fjgf 2y ago
  Thanks but I don't share the choose-your-own-pronouns beliefs involved in this, as these are built upon sexism.
NilMostChill 2y ago
> Might the author be overreacting a bit to this new law As i have read it, no, it's worth a read to see for yourself though. > it doesn't put that much of an onerous demand on forum operators. It doesn't until it does, the issue is the massive amount of work needed to cover the "what if?". It's not clear that it doesn't apply and so it will be abused, that's how the internet works, DMCA, youtube strikes, domain strikes etc. > Then again, maybe he's just burnt out from running these sites and this was the final straw. I can understand if he wants to pack it in after so long, and this is as good reason as any to call it a day. Possibly, worth asking. > Though, has no-one in that community offered to take over? Forums do change hands now and then. Someone else taking over doesn't remove the problem, though there might be someone willing to assume the risk.

jdsnape 2y ago

I did a double take when I saw this here. I’ve lurked on LFGSS, posted from time to time and bought things through it. Genuinely one of the best online communities I’ve been in, and the best cycling adjacent one by far. Having said all that, I can’t criticise the decision. It makes me sad to see it and it feels like the end of an era online

angled 2y ago
Just like our knees… we might have started as fg, but now ss, and soon our Phils will not be laced for the track but for our chairs. The fight is fading.

tracker1 2y ago

Okay, I'm putting up a new bbs in the US that is only going to be accessible via SSH modern terminal only... UK users will be more than welcome. I've been wanting to pay with remote modern terminals and Ratatui anyway.

anthk 2y ago
Or just use a news server and create a tilde with gopher/irc and so on, then federate it with the tildeverse.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

owisd 2y ago

The actual OfCom code of practice is here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/illegal-content-codes-of-practice-for-user-to-user-services.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli... A cycling site with 275k MAU would be in the very lowest category where compliance is things like 'having a content moderation function to review and assess suspected illegal content'. So having a report button.

raverbashing 2y ago
If only more people actually read the actual documents in context (same with GDPR), but the tech world has low legal literacy
- constantcrying 2y ago
  Expecting people to read and correctly interpret complex legal documents is absurd. Obviously any lay person is heavily dissuaded by that. I would never except personal liability for my correct interpretation of the GDPR. I would be extremely dumb if I did.
xdennis 2y ago
> having a content moderation function to review and assess suspected illegal content That costs money. The average person can't know every law. You have to hire lawyers to adjudicate every report or otherwise assess every report as illegal. No one is going to do that for free if the penalty for being wrong is being thrown in prison. A fair system would be to send every report of illegal content to a judge to check if it's illegal or not. If it is the post is taken down and the prosecution starts. But that would cost the country an enormous amount of money. So instead the cost is passed to the operators. Which in effect means only the richest or riskiest sites can afford to continue to operate.
constantcrying 2y ago
This isn't how laws work. If you give a layperson a large law and tell him that, if he is in violation, he has to pay millions, then it pretty much doesn't matter that there is some way where, with some effort, he can comply. Most people aren't lawyers and figuring out how to actually comply with this is incredibly tedious and risky, as he is personally liable for any mistakes he makes interpreting those laws. Companies have legal departments, which exist to figure out answers to questions like that. This is because these questions are extremely tricky and the answers might even change as case law trickles in or rules get revised. Expecting individuals to interpret complex rulesets under threat of legal liability is a very good way to make sure these people stop what they are doing.

edm0nd 2y ago

[flagged]

tyushk 2y ago
> Block UK users The site is primarily focused on London/UK biking enthusiasts. > Make a forum that is only for UK users That is the forum for UK users. > Just ignore the law and fight it The linked post mentions that the fines for failure to comply start at £18 million. I'd understand not wanting to take that risk. > Setup the forums on bulletproof hosting which ignore such silly laws. I think this is the most viable strategy, but even then the site owner incurs risks through ie. ownership of the domain or considerable participation.
- crtasm 2y ago
  £18m is a maximum, not a minimum, but your point stands.

kragen 2y ago

That's terrible. Hopefully the users can make backups (of at least what has already been posted, if not of their ongoing social connections) before the shutdown. It's good that you can provide such notice. Are you providing tarballs?

setgree 2y ago

An insightful comment on this from an American context, but about basically the same problem [0] > Read the regs and you can absolutely see how complying with them to allow for banana peeling could become prohibitively costly. But the debate of whether they are pro-fruit or anti-fruit misses the point. If daycares end up serving bags of chips instead of bananas, that’s the impact they’ve had. Maybe you could blame all sorts of folks for misinterpreting the regs, or applying them too strictly, or maybe you couldn’t. It doesn’t matter. This happens all the time in government, where policy makers and policy enforcers insist that the negative effects of the words they write don’t matter because that’s not how they intended them. > I’m sorry, but they do matter. In fact, the impact – separate from the intent – is all that really matters. [0] https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-theyre https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-the...

missinglugnut 2y ago
That's an excellent article. Another quote I found especially relevant: >Every step that law takes down the enormous hierarchy of bureaucracy, the incentives for the public servants who operationalize it is to take a more literal, less flexible interpretation. By the time the daycare worker interacts with it, the effect of the law is often at odds with lawmakers’ intent. Put another way, everyone in the chain is incentivized to be very risk averse when faced with a vague regulation, and this risk aversion can compound to reach absurd places.

greener_grass 2y ago

Are you Velocio? Thanks for all the hard work! Sad that lufguss will probably become just another channel on one of the big platforms. RIP.

buro9 2y ago
yup, and thank you for the kind words
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I wonder how much of the risk could be mitigated by simply disabling the private message function of microcosm? Surely having reports button help moderating the "public facing part" of a forum? Having said that, thanks for all the work you have done. I was (and maybe still am) a member of lfgss although I mostly lurked once in a long while without logging in and barely commented over the years. It is sad to see all online communities slowly migrate to discord, reddit and other walled gardens.

cakealert 2y ago

This seems like a classic "Don't interrupt your adversary when they are making a mistake" situation. The EU and UK have been making these anti-tech, anti-freedom moves for years. Nothing can be better if you are from the US. Just hoover up talent from their continent.

sunshowers 2y ago
Have you seen how difficult US immigration is to navigate? It's impossible for most people, and about to get even harder soon. Even if US immigration were more liberal, moving is very costly (financially, emotionally, psychologically). Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

webspinner 2y ago

This is what bad legislation does, punish small communities!

okasaki 2y ago

Why not hand it over to someone else who would take the risk? Seems a bit megalomaniacal. "I'm not interested in doing this any more. Therefore I'll shut it down for everyone"

wccrawford 2y ago
Because then they're responsible, at least socially, for the things the new admin does. This way, people have been given plenty of advanced notice and can start their own forums somewhere instead. I'm sure each of the 300 subforums already has some people running them, and they could do the above if they actually cared. I find it hard to believe someone will take over 300 forums out of the goodness of their hearts and not start making it worse eventually, if not immediately.
- throw646577 2y ago
  > Because then they're responsible, at least socially, for the things the new admin does. Nonsense.
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    If you hand someone a ton of power and they abuse it, you can expect, at the very least, the people affected by that abuse to blame you for handing it to the wrong person. And since social media works the way it does, you can also expect a ton of unaffected people to also pick up their pitchforks and join in without having any real clue what's going on. And that's assuming there isn't some law somewhere that really does put you on the hook for it. 300 forums is a lot of power. It makes a lot more sense to expect the sub-admins of those forums to start their own communities elsewhere than for just hand power to a single person over all of them.
    - throw646577 2y ago
      > 300 forums is a lot of power. Yes, that's possibly 100 middle-aged men you could urge into battle!

jimnotgym 2y ago

Does everyone else remember when GDPR came out and everyone running a website was extradited to Europe and fined a billion pounds.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

Please consider working with Archive Team and/or the Internet Archive to preserve the content of the site.

pabs3 2y ago
FTR, the admin is now talking to ArchiveTeam and is willing to help reduce barriers to archiving the site to IA. For eg removing rate limits, allow-listing AT user-agents etc.
kurisufag 2y ago
you don't need archiveteam to save databases you already have. just dump the PII columns and put 'em up for torrent.
- labster 2y ago
  I’m not a lawyer but I wouldn’t recommend posting a dump of the PII columns lol
  - kurisufag 2y ago
    goddamn the English language
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  I'd argue that despite technically being higher fidelity, the SQL dump is less useful than the archive team style http request dump, because the latter fits into the Wayback Machine while the former would require extra steps to meaningfully access the data. (Unless of course someone is resurrecting the site)
  - pabs3 2y ago
    Usually ArchiveTeam will do both where we can. For example we do wikis that are shutting down with both ArchiveBot (recursively download the site, saving in WARC format and uploading to web.archive.org) and Wikibot (download MediaWiki/DokuWiki source text exports in a way that can be restored later, upload to archive.org). https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Wikibot https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Wikibot

schappim 2y ago

We have something similar in Australia with the Online Safety Act 2021. I think this highlights a critical misunderstanding at the heart of the legislation: it imagines the internet as a handful of giant platforms rather than a rich tapestry of independent, community-driven spaces. The Online Safety Act’s broad, vague requirements and potential penalties are trivial hurdles for billion-dollar companies with in-house legal teams, compliance departments, and automatic moderation tooling. But for a single individual running a forum as a labour of love—or a small collective operating on volunteer time—this creates a legal minefield where any disgruntled user can threaten real financial and personal harm. In practice, this means the local cycling forum that fostered trust, friendship, and even mental health support is at risk of vanishing, while the megacorps sail on without a scratch. Ironically, a measure allegedly designed to rein in “Big Tech” ends up discouraging small, independent communities and pushing users toward the same large platforms the legislation was supposedly targeting. It’s discouraging to watch governments double down on complex, top-down solutions that ignore the cultural and social value of these smaller spaces. We need policy that recognises genuine community-led forums as a public good, encourages sustainable moderation practices, and holds bad actors accountable without strangling the grassroots projects that make the internet more human. Instead, this act risks hollowing out our online diversity, leaving behind a more homogenised, corporate-dominated landscape.

paranoidrobot 2y ago
> We have something similar in Australia with the Online Safety Act 2021. That wasn't the one I was thinking of, to be honest. I'd have thought you would be mentioning the latest ball of WTF: "Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024". According to the bill, HN needs to identify all Australian users to prevent under-16's from using it. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/bd/bd2425/25bd39 https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
- snibsnib 2y ago
  That bill is an amendment to the aforementioned act. But yes, I'm confused as to whether it applies to online gaming, or sites such as wikipedia as well

reaperducer 2y ago

I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users I can't imagine one person running over 300 forums with 275,000 active users. That gives you an average of eight minutes a week to tend to the needs of each one. I used to run a single forum with 50,000 active users, and even putting 20 hours a week into it, I still didn't give it everything it needed. I know someone currently running a forum with about 20,000 active users and it's a full-time job for him. I don't understand how it's possible for one person to run 300 forums well.

prmoustache 2y ago
He is running the infra and maintain the code. Each of those forums have their own moderators. They are basically his customers. I think what he fears is he has no control on how these individual forums moderate their content and how liable he would be as the hosting admin.
- ArchOversight 2y ago
  Op uses they/them pronouns.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Sorry, genuine mistake. I haven't seen mention of their pronouns.
squigz 2y ago
With 1 or 2 competent mods, a forum can be very low-maintenance.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  When I was running the 50,000 user forum, I had five. Mods are great, but I still can't grok 300+ forums all being done well. He'd need hundreds of mods.

beacon294 2y ago

It's much more responsible to put this whole thing into some nonprofit trust format and hand it over to someone with the time and energy to handle it. This also would not exclude you from volunteering.

dspillett 2y ago
I can understand them not wanting the due diligence burden (even if only self-imposed rather than required for any official reason) of picking a successor in this way, or the admin burden of setting up “some non-profit trust format”. Also depending on the terms agreed to when people signed on and started posting, it might be legally or morally difficult because transferring the data to the control of another party could be against the letter or the spirit of the terms users agreed to. Probably not, but I wouldn't want to wave such potential concerns off as “nah, it'll be fine” and hoping for the best. Even leaving a read-only version up, so a new home could develop with the old content remaining for reference, isn't risk free: the virtual-swatting risk that people are concerned about with this regulation would be an issue for archived content as much as live stuff. At least people have a full three months notice. Maybe in that time someone can come up with a transfer and continuation plan the current maintainer is happy with, if not the users at least have some time to try to move any social connectivity based around the site elsewhere.
- beacon294 2y ago
  I did say it's more responsible, which I get is a values judgment.

janniehater 2y ago

[dead]

jimnotgym 2y ago

The laughable thing is believing that Ofcom has any budget to prosecute anyone, let alone a small website.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>Any monies donated in excess of what is needed to provide the service through to 16th March 2025 will be spent personally on unnecessary bike gear or astrophotography equipment, but more likely on my transition costs as being transfemme I can tell you there is zero NHS support and I'm busy doing everything DIY (reminder to myself, need to go buy some blood tests so I can guess my next dosage change)... Not that I imagine there will be an excess, but hey, I must be clear about what would happen if there were an excess. I would argue the honorable thing to do in the event excess monies remain would be to donate it to a charity. Using it for personal ends, whatever the details, is wrong because that's not what the donations were for.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
Welcome to British humour, and - it's spelled correctly.

soulofmischief 2y ago

Have you considered handing off the forums to someone based outside of the UK? I'm sure you might be able to find a reasonable steward and divest without leaving your users stranded. You've worked very hard and have something to be proud of, I would hate to see it go.

dutchbrit 2y ago
"The Act applies to services even if the companies providing them are outside the UK should they have links to the UK. This includes if the service has a significant number of UK users"
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  >"...This includes if the service has a significant number of UK users". "[A] significant number"? How Britishly vague. There was one person involved in the doompf of that ceo guy.... I would say that a significant-sized football crowd would be over 75,000. That's a lot of numbers that 'significant', has to lean on.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    > The subsection headed ‘User numbers’ (which begins at paragraph 5.7) explains when a service is to be treated as having more than a particular number of monthly active United Kingdom users for those measures which apply in relation to services of a certain size, and how to calculate the number of monthly active United Kingdom users. The definition of ‘large service’ is included in the definitions section in Section 5 of this document. That section details how to calculate the figures, because they're relevant for sections like CSAM scanning > Services that are at high risk of imagebased CSAM and (a) have more than 700,000 monthly active United Kingdom users or (b) are file-storage and file-sharing services.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  This is gonna sound crazy, but you can potentially just ignore unjust laws in countries like the UK if you don't live there. At your own risk of course, but that is the nature of protest. If OP divests completely then it should be out of his hands.

kayo_20211030 2y ago

I'm ignoring the comments, they seem to be all about the posters themselves. I have no knowledge of your site, but I'm still sad to see it having to shut down.

Vriska1 2y ago

Hopefully you guys can somehow fight this, Have you contacted any big news sites about this? Also I think its likely there going to be alot of Judicial reviews and legal challenges to this. I don't see how this will hold up under the ECHR.

Dambalala 2y ago

Sad news. I enjoy LFGSS a lot. Thank you for your work.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

What we need is some entity setup in the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, anywhere that is outside of where this law will matter. Sites turned over locals, legally and in other ways. The thing though is how to finance it and how to provide stewardship for the sites going forward. Running sites like this post is about is not profitable. Nor is it too resource intensive.

bluedino 2y ago

In addition to the cookie privacy pop-over when viewing that site, I (as an American) am just amazed how regulated the internet is in Europe compared to the USA. Is there an argument why we would want it any other way?

buro9 2y ago
> In addition to the cookie privacy pop-over when viewing that site I don't know where you're seeing that as the site does not have such things. The only cookies present are essential and so nothing further was needed. The site does not track you, sell your data, or otherwise test you as a source of monetisation. Without such things conforming with cookie laws is trivial... You are conformant by just connecting nothing that isn't essential to providing the service. For most of the sites only a single cookie is set for the session, and for the few via cloudflare those cookies get set too.
tempestn 2y ago
Why we would want it any other way than what? It's not clear to me whether you see the added European regulation as positive or negative.

1cool 2y ago

as a lurker here and at lfgss, just wanted to say lfgss exposed me to so much that i'm thankful for (not only fg/ss but also in cycling culture + more) so thanks for all that buro9! <3