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Mate, get a proper user name please.
I concur with +Velocio lucky indeed, could have easily gone awry...
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New Scientist's story is up:
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Given the choice between death threats against my family from an aggrieved and motivated person who has gone to the effort to identify me personally, or a report to Ofcom from the same aggrieved and motivated person, I will take the report to Ofcom every day of the week. Wouldn't you?
Are you naive enough to think the aggrieved and motivated person would only go the Ofcom route?
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I think you are completely out of order here and can't think why you are pushing this so hard. You speak from experience so know the effort and risk that goes into running an online community. You've spoken in great detail about the perils and pain that you have gone through. So Velocio has decided and has been pretty open that this legislation is the last straw and they are going to pack it in after 20+ years. Absolutely no-one begrudges them that decision and we are in fact all amazed that they have managed it for this long.
You, and others, may feel differently and decide to keep running your communities. Great for you. But why do you find it so hard to imagine that someone has had enough and wants to pack it in or, as suggested, possibly hand it over to others to bear the burden. Have some empathy mate.
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Would've helped if Boing Boing linked to https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/
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Will be gracious and suggest that they are maybe not trolly, just very impassioned. Don't think they have anything to gain from what they're saying and again, the points they make are not invalid, just insensitively delivered. But again @user159377 we get what you're saying yet you need to allow for the fact that everyone has a different risk appetite and this isn't a bad impetus to get LFGSS on a footing which is likely also to ensure its longevity should Dee ever lose the capacity to maintain it.
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I think you are completely out of order here and can't think why you are pushing this so hard. You speak from experience so know the effort and risk that goes into running an online community. You've spoken in great detail about the perils and pain that you have gone through. So Velocio has decided and has been pretty open that this legislation is the last straw and they are going to pack it in after 20+ years. Absolutely no-one begrudges them that decision and we are in fact all amazed that they have managed it for this long.
That's not my point at all. I support Velocio in their decision to shut down the forum.
I do not think my personal circumstance matters too much but for the record my wife and I decided that I would retire last year following the birth of our daughter. I could laugh off death threats when it was just me, we could stomach death threats when it was my wife and I because running online communities has been my passion for decades and the risk was low but now that we have our daughter, we reached the point where the risk was no longer worth it.
I understand that this Ofcom legislation is the straw that broke the camels back for Velocio. That is exactly the point I am making: this legislation is a straw and should be discussed as such, not the wrecking ball that it is being framed as. The legislation deserves discussion and critique but this legislation should not be discussed as an existential threat to the ability of independent forum operators to operate. I ask for honesty, not a lifetime commitment to run a forum.
I also do not think my view on shutting down this forum matters much either, but for the record, I think shutting down a forum instead of handing over ownership is often the right decision. Power structures put in place to fill a vacuum are very hard to get right. A forum does not need to exist forever, people can look back upon this forum fondly, frozen in time in the internet archive, people can splinter off and create their own, new forums, new communities can grow from the fertile soil that this forum leaves behind.
I am not a troll. I am a person deeply passionate about online communities with a long history. I am a person who made the same decision Velocio wants to make. I was referred to this post by a friend who knows that it is an area of interest for me. I understand that this is an emotional discussion for some people, and I understand the complicated feelings everyone has.
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That's exactly my point.
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I'm not a troll, but I've said my piece and I don't wish to outstay my welcome. I'll move on. I enjoyed the opportunity to write about my passion. Thank you. And thank you for running an independent forum for 16 years. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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I'm not a troll, but I've said my piece and I don't wish to outstay my welcome. I'll move on. I enjoyed the opportunity to write about my passion. Thank you. And thank you for running an independent forum for 16 years. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Truly hard to tell as I'm sure you'll appreciate: no username, no cited links to support what you say, anonymous / masked email... and some of your phrasing is more ad-hominem attack, or at least felt that way to me.
I respect your opinion too, some of your points are valid, but you also state yours with personal circumstances shaping your risk assessment, and that too is very valid, and of course individuals run these services and individuals all have very different personal circumstances and risk thresholds that change over time.
I might argue my risk thresholds have remained static, but that is likely a fallacy, when I was younger, fresh off the streets (rough sleeper) and hacking together forums... I had nothing to lose and everything (a chosen family) to gain... I could take all risks and laugh them off and hadn't yet experienced things that would give me reason to pause or that would suggest I was naive. Now I am older, and I have far more to lose, and far less to gain, and running so many forums I feel like I've seen it all online, and experienced a lot personally... my risk threshold has changed.
To me though, the OSA feels less like a straw on the camel's back... the GDPR felt like a straw as being so privacy conscious and storing so little that was trivial to comply with... but this feels more like a bale of straws. You likely (obviously?) disagree, that is your opinion and is shaped by your risk assessment, but for me it is a bale of straws, not a minor thing, a major thing... and from that perspective my decision is rational and reasonable, as are similar decisions taken by other forum admins.
I still love the tech side, still love the people side, am happy in life, but this for me is a lot that I would not and do not choose to sign up to... if it falls within the risk threshold of others to take the baton, great... good for them... but I've asked for volunteers in the past and none materialised and in that light, with a clock now ticking... shuttering gives the greatest notice period possible for finding another place... jumping in the Discord life raft... or maybe, just maybe, a team figuring out how to organise and take over.
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@Velocio, have you considered diaspora as a possible asylum? I don't really know anything about it beyond what the web-site says about it and the fact that a friend of mine uses it.
https://diasporafoundation.org/
I'm sure there will be catches somewhere (such as 'podmin', urgh), but I thought I'd mention it.
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It's old, and not currently suited to the legal issues of the day.
One could imagine ActivityPub being made a backend to the forum, and the forum being "everyone runs a local node and it talks to each other to create the whole", which is a bit like how email servers used to be.
Many parts of this forum platform were actually designed to enable multiple fora to share things, to seed new communities from the parts of others, because the one of the natural lifecycles of a community is that it grows and schisms, and it's not a bad thing to embrace that.
It's surprising how much of this tech stack could, with a degree of effort, be plugged into GoToSocial and be fediverse native... but anyone running an instance that isn't a single-person instance still comes under the OSA. Perhaps you no longer care as it would create a million small websites rather than just 50-100k larger ones... too large a surface area for regulation... but it should be noted that fediverse sites are still subject to the regulation.
It's interesting that it's the money that becomes the issue... because when a site is large enough to require donations or monetisation in another form... it can be controlled, you can't hide it, push it underground, throw it behind Tor... and money in the modern world is very trackable. When things are small, and when they're hosted all over the place... very very hard to apply regulation to them.
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Thanks @moocher and @Sparky, have updated the post here - https://www.lfgss.com/comments/17616647/
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[Deleted so as not to derail.]
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Deleted so as not to derail
Now we're talking. One of the best Star Trek stories ever!
coventry_eagle
Sparky
rhb
Lebowski
youClown
skydancer
user159377
t-v
OliverĀ Schick
exteroceptive
NotThamesWater
jellybaby
nick_h.
BareNecessities-
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About
LFGSS and Microcosm shutting down 16th March 2025 (the day before the Online Safety Act is enforced)
Posted by
@Velocio
Cant remember who was compiling reportage, but we made it to boing boing too
https://boingboing.net/2024/12/18/britains-online-safety-rules-come-into-force-andl-ocal-sites-are-already-shutting-down.html