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.<p>and it's all being shut down.<p>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.<p>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.<p>in over 28 years I've run close to 500 fora in total, and they've changed so many lives.<p>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.<p>but on 17th March 2025 it will become too much, no longer tenable, the personal liability and risks too significant.<p>I guess I'm just the first to name a date, and now we'll watch many small communities slowly shutter.<p>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.
Is there some generalized law (yet) about unintended consequences? For example:<p>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.<p>or<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
The actual OfCom code of practice is here: <a href="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" rel="nofollow">https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...</a><p>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.
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.
>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.<p>This says it so well, acknowledging the work of a misguided bureaucracy.<p>Looks like it now <i>requires</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It was already bad enough before without a newly imposed, bigger moving target than everything else combined :\<p>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.
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.<p>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
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.
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.<p>Just email us.
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?
> 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<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Though, has no-one in that community offered to take over? Forums do change hands now and then.
The whole government page at <a href="https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/time-for-tech-firms-to-act-uk-online-safety-regulation-comes-into-force/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...</a> has an off-putting and threatening tone, celebrating how wonderful it is that online spaces will be tied in bureaucratic knots. Disgraceful.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
An insightful comment on this from an American context, but about basically the same problem [0]<p>> 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.<p>> I’m sorry, but they do matter. In fact, the impact – separate from the intent – is all that really matters.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-theyre" rel="nofollow">https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-the...</a>
> <i>as a forum moderator you are known, and you are a target</i><p>I want to emphasize just how true this is, in case anyone thinks this is hyperbole.<p>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.)
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.
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.
<i>I run just over 300 forums, for a monthly audience of 275k active users</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>I know someone currently running a forum with about 20,000 active users and it's a full-time job for him.<p>I don't understand how it's possible for one person to run 300 forums well.
Remember when Omegle shut down recently? <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20231109003559/https://omegle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20231109003559/https://omegle.co...</a><p>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.
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!)<p>The stories… people get really personally invested in their online arguments and have all sorts of bad behavior that stems from it.
It's insane that they never carved out any provisions for "non big-tech".<p>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.<p>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.
I'm ignoring the comments, they seem to be all about the posters themselves.<p>I have no knowledge of your site, but I'm still sad to see it having to shut down.
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.<p>The thing though is how to finance it and how to provide
stewardship for the sites going forward.<p>Running sites like this post is about is not profitable.
Nor is it too resource intensive.
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?
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.<p>I've been wanting to pay with remote modern terminals and Ratatui anyway.
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.
> 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.<p>So basically is this act a ban on indvidual communication through undermoderated platforms?
This seems like a classic "Don't interrupt your adversary when they are making a mistake" situation.<p>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.
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.<p>Is there an argument why we would want it any other way?
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.<p>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.
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)<p>so thanks for all that buro9! <3
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.<p>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.
Why not hand it over to someone else who would take the risk?<p>Seems a bit megalomaniacal.<p>"<i>I'm</i> not interested in doing this any more. Therefore I'll shut it down for everyone"
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.
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.
>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.<p>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.
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.