Death Of A Forum: How The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities

We’ve been warning for years that the UK’s Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or “shilling” for Big Tech. But as we’ve long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law’s immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would crumble.

Well, it’s already happening.

On Monday, the London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) online forum announced that it would be shutting down the day before the Online Safety Act goes into effect. It noted that it is effectively impossible to comply with the law. This was in response to UK regulator Ofcom telling online businesses that they need to start complying.

This includes registering a “senior person” with Ofcom who will be held accountable should Ofcom decide your site isn’t safe enough. It also means that moderation teams need to be fully staffed with quick response times if bad (loosely defined) content is found on the site. On top of that, sites need to take proactive measures to protect children.

While all of this may make sense for larger sites, it’s impossible for a small one-person passion project forum for bikers in London. For a small, community-driven forum, these requirements are not just burdensome, but existential.

LFGSS points out that the rules are designed for big companies, not small forums, even as it’s likely covered by the law:

we’re done… we fall firmly into scope, and I have no way to dodge it. The act is too broad, and it doesn’t matter that there’s never been an instance of any of the proclaimed things that this act protects adults, children and vulnerable people from… the very broad language and the fact that I’m based in the UK means we’re covered.

The act simply does not care that this site and platform is run by an individual, and that I do so philanthropically without any profit motive (typically losing money), nor that the site exists to reduce social loneliness, reduce suicide rates, help build meaningful communities that enrich life.

The act only cares that is it “linked to the UK” (by me being involved as a UK native and resident, by you being a UK based user), and that users can talk to other users… that’s it, that’s the scope.

I can’t afford what is likely tens of thousand to go through all the legal hoops here over a prolonged period of time, the site itself barely gets a few hundred in donations each month and costs a little more to run… this is not a venture that can afford compliance costs… and if we did, what remains is a disproportionately high personal liability for me, and one that could easily be weaponised by disgruntled people who are banned for their egregious behaviour (in the years running fora I’ve been signed up to porn sites, stalked IRL and online, subject to death threats, had fake copyright takedown notices, an attempt to delete the domain name with ICANN… all from those whom I’ve moderated to protect community members)… I do not see an alternative to shuttering it.

The conclusion I have to make is that we’re done… Microcosm, LFGSS, the many other communities running on this platform… the risk to me personally is too high, and so I will need to shutter them all.

But it’s not just the LFGSS that’s shutting down, but also Microcosm, the open source forum platform underlying LFGSS which was apparently created by the same individual and offered similar local community forums for others beyond just the London biking community.

Apparently, Microcosm is hosting approximately 300 small communities, all of which will either shut down or have to migrate within three months. The developer behind all of this seems understandably devastated:

It’s been a good run, I’ve administered internet forums since 1996 having first written my own in Perl to help fans of music bands to connect with each other, and I then contributed to PHP forum software like vBulletin, Vanilla, and phpBB, before finally writing a platform in Go that made it cost efficient enough to bring interest based communities to so many others, and expand the social good that comes from people being connected to people.

Approximately 28 years and 9 months of providing almost 500 forums in total to what is likely a half a million people in that time frame… the impact that these forums have had on the lives of so many cannot be understated.

The peak of the forums has been the last 5 years, we’ve plateaued around 275k monthly users across the almost 300 websites on multiple instances of the platform that is Microcosm, though LFGSS as a single community probably peaked in the 2013-2018 time period when it alone was hitting numbers in excess of 50k monthly users.

The forums have delivered marriages, births, support for those who have passed (cancer being the biggest reason), people reunited with stolen bikes, travel support, work support, so much joy and happiness and memorable experiences… but it’s also been directly cited by many as being the reason that they are here today, the reason they didn’t commit suicide or self-harm. It’s help people get through awful relationship breakups, and helped people overcome incredible challenges with their health.

It’s devastating to just… turn it off… but this is what the Act forces a sole individual running so many social websites for a public good to do.

This is why we’ve spent years warning people. When you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook.

Policymakers have repeatedly brushed off warnings about these consequences, insisting that concerns are overblown or merely fear-mongering from big tech companies looking to avoid regulation. But it’s not. And we’re seeing the impact already.

The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it’s a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.

Some might still argue that this law is “making the internet safer,” but it sure seems to be destroying smaller online communities that many people relied on.

It may be too late for the UK, but one would hope that other countries (and states) realize this and step back from the ledge of passing similar legislation.