LFGSS and Microcosm shutting down 16th March 2025 (the day before the Online Safety Act is enforced)

It is most likely the stupidest idea ever, but I guess that at this stage anything goes: the fate of the french side of LFGSS, pignolefixe.microcosm.app, is of course completely tied to that of LFGSS.

I understand that, given the potentially gigantic fine, you don't want to be even a little bit at risk @Velocio. Would passing the reins (on paper) to a french citizen and have a majority french userbase put you comfortably out of harm's way?

If that's the case, could we imagine a merger of some kind? Pignolefixe userbase is unfortunately much smaller than lfgss', but maybe keeping the access limited to currently active lfgss users (until the legislation gets clearer, at least), you might achieve a majority non-UK users on the merged website?

I think, on the french side, we'd all be more than happy to create tens of accounts if needed to tip the scales, though I imagine the legislation will mostly track actually active users.

This is actually not a bad idea. At least to preserve PignoleFixe and a few of the international forums on this main instance of the server.

I'll investigate moving the servers to a European Linode as PignoleFixe is actually on Linode London. I'll need to work with someone to pass ownership to... and hey PignoleFixe you'll have to finally raise a few donations to pay for it.

Some of the forums are English language, but I don't know where the users are, maybe UK, but could easily be Ireland... this place doesn't require location or track it. On this instance, the primary one, there's about 20 fora, the biggest are LFGSS and PignoleFixe.

Let me look into that tomorrow.

Already looked into it, it's relatively easy for me to move the forum to Europe, specifically to Linode Europe in the German datacenter.

I'll do this to at least provide the french forums confidence that there is a path.