Libera Chat receives legal advice that the Online Safety Act does not apply to

Summary

The good advice 25th October 2025 by She First of all, a massive thank you to everyone who donated since our last post. Our income on Liberapay has roughly quadrupled from what it was before the post. We have also had people reach out to us for large one-time monetary and hardware donations. Your support is truly appreciated! And now for a followup from our last post. TL;DR: the legal firm we’ve engaged has sent us a memo indicating that in their opinion we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. They also believe we would be at low risk of attempted enforcement action even if Ofcom does consider us to be in-scope for the OSA. We will continue to ensure that this is the case by keeping internal estimates of our UK user base and by continuing with our current efforts to keep Libera.Chat reasonably safe. We have no plans to institute any ID requirements for the forseeable future. If that’s all you wanted to know, then feel free to stop here. However, we feel it’s in the best interest of online communities like ours for us to summarise the advice we were given in hopes that it will be useful to others. This is not legal advice from us to you. This advice was provided to Libera Chat as an assessment of our specific case. We accept no responsibility if you decide to apply advice given to us to your own online service. Why does this even matter? You might be asking why we’ve even bothered to get legal advice on this matter. Libera Chat (the non-profit that runs the Libera.Chat IRC network) is based in Sweden. Our bank is Swedish, and we do not rely on any UK-based payment providers. We have a few servers in the UK, but they can be migrated on short notice. In other words, the British government has relatively little authority over us. The most damaging action they can reasonably take is to instruct internet service providers in the UK to deny access to us. Relatedly, some online communities have deci...