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

[buro9]

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.

[MarkusWandel]

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.

[btown]

> Introduce rules so hard to comply with that only big tech will be able to comply

When intentional, this is Regulatory Capture. Per https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp :

> Regulation inherently tends to raise the cost of entry into a regulated market because new entrants have to bear not just the costs of entering the market but also of complying with the regulations. Oftentimes regulations explicitly impose barriers to entry, such as licenses, permits, and certificates of need, without which one may not legally operate in a market or industry. Incumbent firms may even receive legacy consideration by regulators, meaning that only new entrants are subject to certain regulations.

A system with no regulation can be equally bad for consumers, though; there's a fine line between too little and too much regulation. The devil, as always, is in the details.

[Rygian]

It's called "Perverse incentive" and Wikipedia runs an illustrative set of examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

[humodz]

There's the Cobra Effect popularized by Freakonomics

Too many cobras > bounty for slain cobras > people start breeding them for the bounty > law is revoked > people release their cobras > even more cobras around

[PKop]

Why do people foolishly claim these are unintended consequences?

This is a way to regulate political speech and create a weapon to silence free speech online. It's what opponents to these measures have been saying forever. Why do we have to pretend those enacting them didn't listen, are naive, or are innocent well intentioned actors? They know what this is and what it does. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Related to this, and one version of a label for this type of silencing particularly as potentially weaponized by arbitrary people not just politicians is Heckler's veto. Just stir up a storm and cite this convenient regulation to shut down a site you don't like. It's useful to those enacting these laws that they don't even themselves have to point the finger, disgruntled users or whoever will do it for them.

[FredPret]

Politicians should take a mandatory one-week training in:

- very basic macro economics

- very basic game theory

- very basic statistics

Come to think of it, kids should learn this in high school

[nine_k]

There also is a very simple, uncontrived effect. You put pressure to a thing, the thing is quashed and ceased to exist.

Many things in a society exist on thin margins, not only monetary, but also of attention, free time, care and interest, etc. You put a burden, such as a regulation, saying that people have to either comply or cease the activity, and people just cease it, like in the post. What used to be a piece of flourishing (or festering, depending on your POV) complexity gets reduced to a plain, compliant nothing.

Maybe that was the plan all along.

[pessimizer]

> Is there some generalized law (yet) about unintended consequences?

These are not unintended consequences. All media legislation of late has been to eliminate all but the companies that are largest and closest to government. Clegg works at Facebook now, they'd all be happy to keep government offices on the premises to ensure compliance; they'd even pay for them.

Western governments are encouraging monopolies in media (through legal pressure) in order to suppress speech through the voluntary cooperation of the companies who don't want to be destroyed. Those companies are not only threatened with the stick, but are given the carrots of becoming government contractors. There's a revolving door between their c-suites and government agencies. Their kids go to the same schools and sleep with each other.

[dredmorbius]

Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term "unintended consequences" (amongst numerous others), and developed an existing notion of manifest vs. latent functions and dysfunctions.

In particular, Merton notes:

Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences.

Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016).

<https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co...>

More on Merton:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton#Unanticipated...>

Unintended consequences:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences#Robert...>

Manifest and latent functions:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...>

[bboygravity]

This is what Javier Milei means when he says that everything politicians touch turns to shit and therefor government should be minimal.

[schappim]

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]

> 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_Legislat...

[pif]

> it imagines the internet as a handful of giant platforms rather than a rich tapestry of independent, community-driven spaces.

As sad as it may be, their imagination is correct. The small spaces, summed up all together, are lost in the rounding errors.

[KennyBlanken]

You're assuming the point of these laws is what they say on the tin and the people writing these laws are ignorant. A huge amount of legislation is written by think tanks and lobbyists.

Authoritarians don't want people to be able to talk (and organize) in private. What better way to discourage them than some "think of the children" nonsense? That's how they attacked (repeatedly) encryption.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter all could have lobbied against this stuff and shut it down, hard. They didn't.

That speaks volumes, and my theory is that they feel shutting down these forums will push people onto their centralized platforms, increasing ad revenues - and the government is happy because it's much easier to find out all the things someone is discussing online.

[owisd]

The actual OfCom code of practice is here: 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.

[constantcrying]

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.

[orf]

This: OP seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Im surprised they don’t already have some form of report/flag button.

[xdennis]

> 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.

[wizzwizz4]

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42434349

[raverbashing]

If only more people actually read the actual documents in context (same with GDPR), but the tech world has low legal literacy

[alangibson]

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.

[luma]

This feels relevant to your comment: https://archive.is/9V2Bf

Orgs are already fleeing LSEG for deeper capital markets in the US.

[FredPret]

As an aside, the UK is a great tourist destination, especially if you leave London right after landing.

Beautiful landscape, the best breakfast around, really nice people, tons of sights to see.

[observationist]

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.

[fuzzfactor]

>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]

> 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?

[jdsnape]

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]

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.

[soulofmischief]

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.

[preinheimer]

There’s several stories of open source projects being handed off to someone who seemed helpful, only to have them turn around and add malware months later.

I completely understand a desire to shut things down cleanly, rather than risk something you watched over for years become something terrible.

[stavros]

This is my question as well. It seems like there would be someone willing to do this, especially outside the EU.

Finding someone trustworthy is hard, but I know buro9 knows tons of people.

[dutchbrit]

"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"

[rsync]

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.

[dom96]

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?

[bogwog]

> 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.

[radicality]

The linked page has this phrasing, which I’m not entirely sure what it means, but could be understood as personal liability?

> Senior accountability for safety. To ensure strict accountability, each provider should name a senior person accountable to their most senior governance body for compliance with their illegal content, reporting and complaints duties.

[akoboldfrying]

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.

[fjgf]

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.

[baggy_trough]

The whole government page at 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.

[constantcrying]

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.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

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

[setgree]

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-the...

[pavel_lishin]

> 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.)

[superkuh]

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.

[zulban]

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.

[reaperducer]

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.

[agnishom]

Remember when Omegle shut down recently? 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.