Y’all, the UK’s law about needing an ID to be on any social media platform over 10,000 users is the canary in the coal mine. Similar laws have already been proposed by US states and other countries. On a long enough timeline, this is coming for us all.
So, with that in mind, I want to get in early with some good old fashioned forum sites. You know, the kind that have no app and don’t need my Fing ID to let me sign up.
Any topic welcome as long as the community is active and strong.
Something Awful is still around. But the forum isn’t free.
What? You have to pay to be a racist sexist gore porn addict now?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/3-poll-of-the-day
90’s old, but now with ads.
reminds me of Korean internet, where you need to go through rigorous and complex verification using your national ID to even create an account on a shitty website. and then you need to login daily and post consistently to even unlock basic features. and the points accrue slower than karma; people’s reactions don’t matter nearly as much as just logging in daily and waiting a long time.
Korean website design is by far, hands down, the worst design we’ve ever come up with in the internet. but hey they got fast speeds!
The Unraid forums are very active.
The Seat Cupra forums are still active, and seems to be a great place for help with your car.
As far as I understand it I thought even old forums were subject to this, or anywhere there’s “peer to peer content”
That’s why it was so dangerous, because big companies would comply to avoid the fine but smaller companies would literally go bankrupt
Yes, but the rinky-dink site needs to also have either a majority UK users, or be focused on the UK market to qualify (per my understanding). Otherwise, globally all forum sites would just fold up because the UK has a stupid law? Why does, for example, Ridgelineownersclub.com/forums need to go offline when the Honda Ridgeline isn’t even sold in the UK?
A lot of small and local news sites in the US, still to this day, just block European IPs because they don’t feel like doing GDPR compliance. The UK version costs money to meet compliance, so I can’t see this going well for anyone over the long term.
globally all forum sites would just fold up because the UK has a stupid law
They can just block access from any UK based IP address and carry on as normal. Like many of them are doing already, including some Lemmy instances (although funnily enough, not lemmynsfw).
Lemmy keeps shitting itself for me, refusing to load anything at all. Im out of the loop on tech for a long time so I cant figure out what’s wrong with it, but every time it does it I think “oh this is it, they’ve just said fuck the uk”
pretty much any communuty dedicated to a specific model of car or motorcycle.
astralcodexten.com is an old school blog that still has a very active comments section.
Ugh FetLife has the worst people though. It’s all horny men who don’t understand boundaries.
Honestly, sounds like an oldschool forum to me!
Yep all the car forms are active. We need to bring back forms. I would like that. And old school chatrooms with no AI or bots. I miss Yahoo chat that also had games you could play with other players. Like Domino’s and Pool.
forums.somethingawful.com is still going strong.
Great general use nerd forum to this day yep. Probably most of us have grey hair.
How does that stinky stupid fucking law work with fediverse? Number of known accounts on the particular instance?
How does that fucking shitty law work with nostr, where there is no concept of accounts nor users?
Off hand, only instances with adult content would really be scrutinized at first, but any lemmy instances based on the UK might have to relocate their servers or domains rather than incur costs of compliance. The law also describes social media as “user-to-user” platforms, and I thought I saw somewhere that 10,000 users was the lower end of platforms they care about. Likely banning UK IPs on all instances would be the only real final step since there’s no money to take in fines from a lemmy instance.
might have to relocate their servers or domains rather than incur costs of compliance.
I’m wondering about that, as I fear it’s insufficient. As long as (1) there could be UK users (using a VPN or not), and (2) there could be “adult” content, the law applies. At least, that’s how I understand it?
Well, a large number of UK users, OR targeting the UK market, is enough as well.
Personally, I think the solution is to have the whole world ban the UK from their websites and see how long this stupid law lasts.
I’m interested in the second part, how # users are determined. Lemmy is federated,instance so if i setup a community instance physically I the UK and cap users at 9999,flying just under the threshold,but i federate with everywhere, my instance don’t have enough users to require compliance, right? What if i set up 5 separate instances,each capped at 9999? There’s got to be a loophole…for the children.
I can’t find the reference to 10,000 users again, so take my own words with a grain of salt. The law itself doesn’t give a minimum number. But if you start a new instance called “dicksoutforharambe.lemmy.uk” with NSFW content, and hosting it on servere physically in the UK, I imagine that within 2-3 years, someone will come calling.
https://www.ridgelineownersclub.com/forums/
That is the only old school forum I have visited in the last few years, but I don’t think it is very relevant to the UK.
Historum (history/humanities forum) is pretty active and has lots of interesting posts!
