Why to save LFGSS and what it looks like (the legal way)

It occurs to me this morning that even assuming the community is held together via the life raft of Discord, that there are reasons to save this technology and to keep using it.

Namely:

• This website does not track you, snitch on you, leak your data.
  
• It is privacy conscious, to the extreme of scrubbing outbound links to prevent tracking.
  
• It is privacy conscious, to the extreme of only embedding things (like YouTube) in a no cookie / non-tracking way.
  
• It has the best UX/UI of any forum or community website, in large part due to simplicity, font choice, size of fonts... and just keeping things so simple and plain that the web browser you choose gives you control over how it appears.
  
  

So... even assuming the community stays together, even looking at Discord as the best of the bunch... this technology is pretty good.

This post and thread then... a recipe for how to do this the legal way.

For this recipe, you will need (at least):

• 1 x Company Director, establish a CIC, and this person takes the standard responsibilities of a company director, as well as being the "officer" for the Online Safety Act... you take all the liability and risk... it's your job to make sure papers are filed, and truly your job is to reduce your risk.
  
• 1 x Secretary / Treasurer, you need a place to receive donations, reimburse bills, which is likely Open Collective, and you need to ensure that the company paperwork is in order including AGM and meeting notes, records of decisions, etc.
  
• 1 x Tech people, this is essentially the person who reboots servers, manages the infra, tweaks code if needed
  
• 2 x Moderators, you need two to ensure you can respond in a timely way when the other is not available, you may need three or more
  
  

That is the list of critical roles that you absolutely must fill.

Additionally, nice-to-haves:

• 1 x Programmer, because you will need to build some new moderation tools and no-one else is coming to do it... if there can be 3-4 of these people you stand a better chance at getting it done.
  
  

That's what I've been doing, all of that... though I gave up on running a CIC when the donations were so low that it was just an overhead expense and the liability didn't scare me as the risk was so low... the risk is not low now, and the liability greater... so yes you'd want a CIC.

I'd still be tempted, if I were you, to move the hosting to Germany, as it's slightly cheaper and because the object storage (attachments, files, etc) are located there it would actually make the site more performant.

I'd also still be tempted, if I were you, to complete the work I started on rewriting the frontend in Go... it would reduce your operational costs further, and make it really trivial to deploy the site anywhere and to update it in future... and more to the point, you're going to need to build moderation tools and the old Django is going to make this very hard, but having all the code in Go will make it significantly easier.

Then you finally need to access the braintank of legal support on here (it's pro-bono, forumengers who are very talented and qualified, but no-one can give indemnity or underwrite legal advice given pro-bono) to help with the OSA risk assessment, compliance docs.

After the risk assessment is done, it will tell you what you need to do to mitigate risk, we are likely "Medium risk" and "Multi-risk", all forums are, so we will be obliged to implement technical solutions to social problems, such as scanning of DMs, URLs, and file uploads, and providing a better reporting button and things like "hide the post automatically if not moderated within n hours"... those tools also need defences, don't underestimate the likelihood of an automated "report every comment" triggering the hiding of all comments on the whole site, so you need to detect bad actors in the moderation process too, and you probably need more queries / reports to find stalkers / harassers, i.e. "find the top people who replied to person A" so that if person A reports being stalked / harassed online that you can quickly verify with data whether that appears to be the case... to mitigate risk requires some tech work.

This is the legal way :) It can be done, in this scenario I'd help as an advisor only, may touch code and servers when needed, but would no longer do the Director, Treasurer, Moderator roles... and only at the very most I'd be a faceless techie to help in the worst incidents based on my experience, nothing more, likely less.

One other reason that I think saving LFGSS is important.

This is something that relies on itself.

There are so many examples in recent history of big tech companies growing based on the good will of their userbase, and then reneging on that implied social contract. They either pull the rug out from under you, or they start doing something that is actively against the users.

Some examples spring to mind:

• Twitter and Reddit forcing the use of their official app, resulting in the end of development of 3rd party clients, or Strava and Spotify curtailing API usage
  
• Youtube growing through on user-generated content and then restricting those users' ability to monetise it
  
• Stack Overflow selling users' content as AI training data without their consent, and banning them for protesting against it
  
• Social media platforms algorithmically reducing the visibility of posts that link out to other sites
  
  

I'm sure there are many other examples of enshittification. But this particular form in which you build your "product" on someone else's "platform", and then they yank it out from under you, is one that really troubles me in our potential move to Discord.

Yes, LFGSS relies on @Velocio (hugely!), and Linode, and Cloudflare, and so on. But those relationships are very different than the cases I've outline above - hopefully that is clear. In a sense, it's a platform whose only motivation is to serve itself as best it can. I think that makes LFGSS so special as a place where a genuine sense of community is fostered.

Would each user paying a small annual membership help the site going forward? The internet has changed so much since LFGSS was born and now the value of a site like this is much greater for us users. Everywhere else is full of adverts and bots.

This is a great post and fills me with joy! Certainly something to work towards so we can keep this great community together.

Id say a quarterly donation/subs if you will to help cover the costs not sure what % open collective would take @Velocio mentioned in other thread that my £5 monthly PayPal donation would probably be better as a £15 quarterly donation, as the fees would be less.

I donate randomly now and then, but would be happy to go with fixed subsciption fees if that would help.

I have a ‘buy the forum a beer’ set up for £4 a month, would definitely be up for increasing that or going quarterly if it’ll help.

I see the donation chat is going on here also the idea of member benefits or a badge next to the user name which is where my thinking was going too. Something to make us feel warm and fuzzy, but not restrict those who can't or don't pay.

You might not need it... Open Collective shows the list of donors and gives you the option to declare that or not, and further Open Collective makes it clear if the tank is full or empty... I should've built that transparency sooner as people would likely top it up when they saw it was empty.

But implementing badges and the like, will take more technical integration, and produce a little rift between the haves and have nots... I always like the "pay what you feel it's worth, according to your means"... and largely that does work.

But warm fuzzies come from being listed on the Open Collective page... and some people absolutely do prefer anonymity to donations, so bear in mind that if you add badges that some will want to hide them.

Premium features:

• receiving notifications via email
  
• sending and receiving rep
  
• first-edition copy of the LFGSS coffee table book
  

sending and receiving rep

Bollocks to that. Cliquey rubbish.

#rep

Would it not by great if we could somehow create a ‘protected characteristics of LFGSS as an on-line community’ under this law

Under the Equality Act 2010, there are 9 protected characteristics which are; age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

We fcuking cover most of the above.. might need a charter around social responsibility and what we represent…

I’m no expert just asking…

Lfgss has been my "Go to" site for entertainment purposes many years. Admittedly I have not donated to the maintenance expenses that go along with keeping it free from annoying pop ups/advertising. It would be a shame to see the site close down. That being said, I plan to send a donation by buying some stickers to rep the community in my hood of Langley, British Columbia, Canada.