There’s a very active IRC channel already,which can be also accessed over XMPP or Matrix,the latter being rather similar to Discord but open-source and privacy-respecting.
I don’t think any of those are going to block UK users.
No need to push for proprietary spyware garbage.
Also,yes,Mastodon will stay an option as it’s extremely unlikely that all thousands of Mastodon servers will block UK users (but probably some of them)
The website with its blog will also stay as a good source for project updates.
Mastodon is a gGmbH company registered in Berlin,Germany,so they’re not affected.
And servers are spread all over the world.
Nobody controls the whole thing,that’s the point of decentralization.
Mastadon is not really comparable and mastadon will not replicate the forum content. Also all forms of live chat are not comparable. Because they are fleeting and not laid out in a forum basis.
I also don’t see why mastadon would be exempt because there is still user to user contact. Twitter was unfortunately one of the catalysts for this legislation.
Yeah,Matrix might be having a difficult time.
But they’re really big,used by numerous European governments and military organizations,so they probably have the funds to deal with the law.
And even if they don’t,there are many other Matrix servers and it’s unlikely that all of them will block UK users.
And then there’s also Movim which offers a somewhat similar experience on the XMPP protocol,that’s what I personally use on my desktop computers since Matrix has always been painfully slow.
That’s true.
Your best solution is probably using Tor.
The Inc. members can’t recommend circumventing the geoblocking for legal reasons,but I can and I do.
It’s as simple as that
pkgman install tor # Install it,one time
tor # Start it,always before you use it
all_proxy=socks5h://127.0.0.1:9050 WebPositive # Configure WebPositive to use it,and open WebPositive
If we use Tor or any other VPN we are still in the UK and the law still applies I would assume. It’s just then, your site is vulnerable and still open to be sued, but you just won’t have any warning.
Sad to read, though I presume this is just the beginning. I would expect the same, or similar, move all across Europe, not just UK. And if I’m not mistaken, before the end of this new year 2025.
Given that there are trivial technical means to circumvent geoblocking, such as VPNs, TOR etc., all of which I would expect to be in use already among many members of this community, wouldn’t it make more sense to simply just ask every visitor “Are you in the UK [Yes|No]”?
I don’t even know if I’m joking. It wouldn’t surprise me if something like that turned out to fulfill the legal requirements.
Is this assumption based on legal advice received by Haiku Inc. or by any of its members?
If not, what is it based on, other than the information from lobste.rs?
2.1. Was that info provided by the lawyers who analysed the Act, or was it part of IANAL discussions?
Would you be willing to reach out to Ofcom for clarifications of what “significant number of United Kingdom users” is, and what constitutes “significant harm”?
Would you be willing to not block the users based in UK until you receive an answer from Ofcom that clearly confirms that discuss.haiku-os.org does indeed qualify as “user-to-user service” under the above definitions?
I hope that the UK will introduce a modification to the law that reduces requirements for smaller websites, so that the forum could re-open to the UK later. But at present it looks like I am going to need a VPN soon. Not sure why they didn’t just make something similar to the EU Digital Services Act.
I agree this may be our loophole… however “significant number” is such a weird term to use here. It’s absolutely odd they didn’t use an actual number. Legally what’s “significant” in the UK? 5, 50, 100? 500? 1000? 100,000?
If we get guidance showing the number of UK users we have is far from whatever “significant” is, I think that’s essentially our safety net of unblocking the UK.
Nope. Purely reading the analyses of the UK OSA, as well as directly reading the OSA itself. I brought all of the information at hand to the board and received similar feelings about it. There was about 10 days of discussion before we moved forward with this forum post.
Purely IANAL discussions. There’s nearly zero support from what i’ve gathered for us to spend cash on lawyers to weigh our legal risk. (which, then could still be bad advice and still put us at risk)
To sum up my interpretation:
The UK OSA is poorly written, and extremely unclear with substantial potential legal impacts to Haiku, Inc.
It’s a legal risk to Haiku, Inc. to offer the forum to UK users.
Nobody is willing to risk donated funds “fighting the OSA / UK”. People donate funds to Haiku to advance the development of the MIT licensed Haiku operating system, not fight UK law.
If we see an easy “oh, this absolutely clearly doesn’t apply to us”, we’ll immediately remove the georestriction.
