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If this moves overseas, wouldn't you still need someone willing to run the servers/backend etc. who is willing to shoulder the risk of enforcement (which is in practice probably low and particularly if they're overseas, though) as long as UK users keep accessing the forum..? Not sure decentralisation necessarily would help unless there is a lot of technical effort to mask IPs etc. of the people involved which is beyond my understanding (because of the wide definition of person/officer in the OSA)! I'd think the majority of the people here are UK based and would probably want access to the forum though, so if it does live on in that form it may be a very different beast to how it is now.
Not to downplay the amount of work needed to comply as you have looked into this the most, but given Ofcom guidance isn't out, is there the chance that when it does come out it'll provide some paths for lower compliance burdens on SMEs/single-person outfits? As I understand the CSAM scanning thing is still slightly in the air as the tech doesn't exist yet/is not widely available..?
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youClown
@Velocio
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.