LFGSS Collective

On the cost, would it not be cheaper to buy some beefy servers and move on prem somewhere friendly?

It might also be better to whip up the crowds and spend a lump of cash in the short term rather than rely on ongoing donations that may dwindle?

If the tech strategy is one of just keep the lights on, then the compute costs (and need for new servers) shouldnt increase.

You're probably right, a single hetzner server plus object storage can do this... But then you have to manage hardware in addition to software. I wouldn't choose that

I’m an SRE for my day job so happy to help on the tech side - plenty of experience with load balancers , wafs and I was once a Postgres dba

I live in Housing CoOp, have spent many years on the Managament Committees of 2 Housing Coops.

I would be happy to spend a couple of hours a week doing work for LFGSS.

Also, if the future looked like a paywalled site with subs of £10 a month, I'd be happy to pay up.

Also Winchester bike hub CIC has offered to be an umbrella for us.

@eespark

I love this forum and it has been a big part of my life for a while.

But won't contribute to any kind of collective effort as frankly I don't trust it in the hands of anyone other than Velocio.

And totally respect those hands need to loosen their grip on the tiller.

I said I would take 'ownership', happy to never have access to anything behind the scenes and quite happily spend my bitcoin -funded early retirement telling Ofcom ta get tae fuck. I just need a crankset for a Surly...

What's the cost breakdown of the 800 per month and can it be reduced without meaningful impact to the service?

I could've run anything in AWS for the last 15 years but I've fucked myself by pointing out how insecure it all is. There's loads of cloud hosting solutions though. Compete for my money, mofos!!!

I'm also happy to do similar, I've not got much technical to invest but I can do some vaguely "in the spirit of the forum" mid level moderation, spread the load/responsibility kinda shit if it's in anyway helpful to be able to flag stuff or put it on hold until higher powers are back from a ride/hike to approve/hammer posts fully, or just jump in front of an ofcom bullet or two if it ever comes to it. Money is minimal but I'll find some.

I don't trust it in the hands of anyone other than Velocio.

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No actual skills to help here, but this place is worth my time and quite happily do prison time.

The idea (imo) is that the hand on the tiller doesn't change. Even tho velocio and I have disagreed, velocio has always been fair.

Just the responsibility, as it is not acceptable that velecio has had stalkers and people attacking them? So they can continue the good work and not have fear in life.

To what extent is the potential rescue plan technical and to what extent administrative? Even on the technical side, I'd imagine the challenge is more one of finding somewhere new to host micrososm and deploy it, than more development. Does somebody smart have a roadmap?

I'm very happy to volunteer time and money to keep LFGSS and the other forums going. Internet forums have been a positive part of my life for gosh, probably 20 years now.

I suspect the new act will be modified in time as ridiculous situations come to pass that aren't achieving what the designers of the act wanted. I absolutely understand the desire to not be the person in the crosshairs, and I'd do the same in your shoes, Velocio!

I can help financially and with some of my time.

My expertise is financial and management rather than legal or tech. I'm a company director, school governor and a charity trustee. Am winding down work so will have time to do things.

I've also got a meeting with ofcom next month - to talk about parcels rather than anything remotely related and so not with the right people - but will bring this up anyway.

Also happy to help with some time and expertise.
I work in Risk/Business management in Financial services also with trustee experience (school governor - so covered things like child safeguarding etc)

Happy to join the Legally DM group if I can be of use with risk assessment process, documenting controls and action plan etc.

It great to explore the offshoreing option, but realistically feels like we can't avoid the specified "significant number of UK users"

As such best bet feels to tackle it head-on: with a detailed risk assessment!

Would a sort of "premium" membership type thing work? ie keep it free but have a paid membership that people get some sort of perk for (not entirely sure what that would be but hey)

Can always offer dev help if it's need, am mostly python/cloud infra based

What's the cost breakdown of the 800 per month and can it be reduced without meaningful impact to the service?

£800 per month is what I recommended try to be raised on an ongoing basis by getting just shy of 250 people to donate £10 every 3 months.

£10 every 3 months minimises the impact of payment provider fees on smaller donations. (There is a single person who donates £1 per month, less than half reaches the account... it's such a waste, it's actually more donation to PayPal than it is to LFGSS).

250 people gives a far better spread of donors, and given that almost 10% expire out every 3 months will provide a bit of a buffer.

That amount should mean that over time you accrue a larger buffer, but never need to hit anyone's personal credit card to pay a hosting bill.

We presently have around that number of donors... but, most are doing £3 or £6, and based on the frequency and higher % of payment fees on the smaller donations, it means we're only getting about £300-350 per month... which is why I top it up every month.

The real breakdown of costs today:

• Linode $375 per month for the virtual machines, backups of the virtual machines, and the object storage (currently shy of 1TB for attachments), we received free bandwidth as part of the VPS costs which allows 22TB of traffic, we typically use about 6TB per month as we are very cache efficient. AWS would wipe us out on bandwidth from the account, and from the object storage.
  
• Tarsnap $25 per month for a remote backup of the database
  
• Twilio / Sendgrid $126 per month for 100k emails and a static IP to send them
  
• Some domain names... approx $100 per year
  
• An SSL cert that is wildcard at $250 per year (as I could never work out how to get certbot and LetsEncrypt to do wildcard + SNI for other FQDN at the same time)
  
  

Some of those costs vary due to exchange rates, but basically $501 per month in fixed monthly costs, another $30 per month in annualised costs... $530 per month being the estimate roughly being £420 per month in intrabank exchange rates... add roughly 10% lost to payment fees and forex rounding up that happens because I never figured out early enough to just pay all the bills from a Wise account... roughly £460 per month at the moment.

Donations bringing in roughly £350 per month, and you see the £100 shortfall... hence I just pay all the bills from my personal account, and draw the PayPal money into that account and absorb the loss. Some months someone will donate £50 or £100, and those months I don't subsidise it.

My rough summary here and recommendations here:

• The hosting is very cheap, there's a lot of headroom, but it's not obvious that reducing the VPS devices would be a smart thing to do (they have too much CPU, but the LB needs the disk space for cache, the DB needs the memory, etc)... given that I don't even know how to deploy the old Django... leave it where it is with Linode, but we can move it to Germany and out of the UK.
  
• The money side could easily be dramatically improved... just have an Open Collective EU account, receive donations there, provide the transparency I never managed to with PayPal... and then pay the bills from a Wise account and reimburse that person... this is very very easy to run, especially if an EU citizen runs it.
  
• Add a new service, a shared Protonmail email or Migadu for probably $100 per year per user/role, and give the volunteers access to that... i.e. have a "admin@microcosm.app" email, and make it accessible by a cohort of volunteers... and avoid having a single named individual as the owner anywhere. You probably only need 1-2 email addresses to cover everything, a Fastmail account might even be sufficient.
  
• Encourage each volunteer to have a password manager like Bitwarden, share credentials via Signal and store in local Bitwarden accounts.
  
• Pay for multiple cheap frontends around the World in various hosting providers, all using a Wireguard VPN or the like to connect to wherever the servers are ultimately hosted... this is probably another $100 per month... and we'd just make the DNS round robin to them because they're stateless caches, if any were taken out, the others would be fine.
  
  

Edit: Updated 2024-12-20 as I added a server to help support the archiving efforts.

I'll emphasise again... the money is the PITA.

I can move the servers to Germany, hand over the keys to some Europeans, shutter the obviously geographic and UK focused forums (Islington CC, Brixton CC, etc)... and move LFGSS to being post-geographic (plausible as a lot of traffic is international, US being very prominent, and Tor seems to be hitting us hard at the moment).

The load balancers could be deployed anywhere and considered disposable, with Tailscale or another Wireguard VPN connecting to wherever the website actually ends up being hosted.

This could easily be an international anarchist collective with no clear owner, and nothing in the UK except for a minority of users.

But the hard thing will always be: Who pays the bills, how do they receive the money.

You can try the "be compliant" route... but read the details, you'd need to add CSAM scanning of attachments, far more moderation tooling, training for moderators... and prove you have all this stuff.

There's a lot of technical work, social work, needed to be compliant. It's not just the risk assessment, as a forum that takes user generated content and provides user-to-user services... we're in the "All Services" and "Multi-Risk Services" buckets of the Ofcom compliance... so if people are serious about keeping something alive, you really have to answer "Are we going to comply and accept that risk?" or "Are we not going to comply and just shutter the UK sites?"... the latter has a path to the platform living on as an international thing that serves international audiences. I'm sure there might be some UK users, but it wouldn't be the focus or intent, and the platform should just outright deny service for UK specific forums (hence you'd still have to shutter Islington CC, Brixton, etc... but could keep a post-geographic LFGSS, PignoleFixe, Espruino and other things)... it would trim the platform to a core few sites, but would be able to live on until such a time that the Europeans also implement a dumb law.

If you make it an anarchist collective in Europe for an international audience... then the only bit to solve is the money... for which I very highly recommend OpenCollective EU.

given that I don't even know how to deploy the old Django

Fwiw, I have a docker file that can be used to deploy the Django front end

Fwiw, I have a docker file that can be used to deploy the Django front end

The old crappy code? you know how to deploy it?

Wow... you achieved what I did not :D I like your style.

It's not that crappy! But yes, I have the whole thing; back end, front end, database, etc, all running locally with docker compose.