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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. 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. 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.

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