The following sites and services have stated that the Online Safety Act 2023 is the reason for their closing, or for geo-blocking UK users.
AWScommunity.social, a Mastodon instance for discussing AWS technologies, with approximately 300 users (epitaph)
Charlbury in the Cotswolds has (as of 2025-02-19) shut its debate forum (epitaph)
Espruino’s forum, a forum for discussing embedded computing (epitaph)
furry.energy, a small (49 user) UK based Mastodon Server oriented towards those in the furry & LGBTQA+ communities (epitaph likely to go missing, as I can’t add it archive.org)
Gaming on Linux, a discussion forum about the operating system Linux and computer games (epitaph)
The Green Living Forum, a discussion board
22 Comments
chris_wot
Apparently the law is dreadfully written. I was reading the lobste.rs thread and wow, it’s like they took a programming course in goto and it statements and applied it to the law…
Izmaki
"Furry.energy"? With a total of 49 members? My World of Warcraft guild has more active players…
jsheard
Hexus is a big one, being UK-based and UK-centric they are just deleting 24 years of history rather than trying to geoblock around it.
IanCal
Right or wrong I think many have misread the legislation or read poor coverage of it given people's reasoning.
Much of things boils down to doing a risk assessment and deciding on mitigations.
Unfortunately we live in a world where if you allow users to upload and share images, with zero checks, you are disturbingly likely to end up hosting CSAM.
Ofcom have guides, risk assessment tools and more, if you think any of this is relevant to you that's a good place to start.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c…
guax
Seems like an overreaction in some of these. Perhaps the people running them were close to the edge and more mental burden just pushes them over it.
It's like local US news websites blocking European users over GDPR concerns.
Fokamul
I will host public proxied site for these websites, open for UK people, just to troll them :D
amiga386
Charlie Stross's blog is next.
Liability is unlimited and there's no provision in law for being a single person or small group of volunteers. You'll be held to the same standards as a behemoth with full time lawyers (the stated target of the law but the least likely to be affected by it)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cl…
The entire law is weaponised unintented consequences.
whatshisface
It seems like governments around the world are shifting their priorities away from their domestic economies.
KennyBlanken
So, how does all this apply to community discords, slacks, Matrix rooms, IRC chats, etc?
Is it discord's responsibility to comply, the admin/moderators, or all of the above?
KennyBlanken
You know what's really rich about the OSA?
One of the exemptions is for "Services provided by persons providing education or childcare."
tac19
Safety from dissent, for an authoritarian government. This is just weaponized "empathy".
rimeice2
[dead]
sepositus
Doesn't this act effectively create a new form of DDoS? A bad actor can sufficiently flood a platform with enough hate content that the moderation team simply cannot keep up. Even if posts default to not show, the backlog could be enough to harm a service.
And of course, it will turn into yet another game of cat and mouse, as bad actors find new creative ways to bypass automatic censors.
maxed
Is Hacker News also affected by this act?
mattvr
Should order this list by number of affected rather than alphabetical IMO. The 275K monthly user platform is almost hidden relative to the 49 and 300 user examples.
v3xro
Just another bad UK law not worth knowing about ;)
logicallee
The State of Utopia has published this report on the source of funding of Ofcom,
the U.K. statutory regulator responsible for enforcing the Online Safety Act:
https://medium.com/@rviragh/ofcom-and-the-online-safety-act-…
cgcrob
I am part of a small specialist online technical community. We just moved it over to a Hetzner box in Germany and someone there is paying for it instead of it being hosted in the UK.
What are you going to do Ofcom?
throwaway48476
Non UK sites should IP block UK IPs and create a block page that advertises VPNs.
dang
Related ongoing thread: Lobsters blocking UK users because of the Online Safety Act – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152178
darnthenuggets
What concept allows the UK to (attempt to) enforce this against non citizens whose business or life has no ties to their country?
Plenty of small countries have odd censorship laws but have escaped similar legal hand wringing.
JFingleton
The Chaos Engine forums – a site for game developers to discuss, moan, and celebrate fellow and former colleagues… Now moved to Discord due to this act. It really is a strange time we are living through.
https://thechaosengine.com/index.php