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

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.