Safety concerns are, as predicted by cypherpunks,being used to censor the internet and crack down on all independent platforms that dare operate outside big tech.
I think the bigger issues for independent platforms are 1) bad actors and 2) people staying on big platforms.
Bad content is more than a legal issue. If you have a public forum, you don't want people publicly posting hate and gore, being creepy, and DM-ing others threats. Your viewers will see hate/gore/creeps/threats, leave your site, tell others not to visit, and if the content is bad enough be scarred. You will be scarred. Your site will become filled with awful people. Then there's the issue of spam, which you must block simply because it will use up all your site's resources.
But even with those issues, there are many, many independent platforms that exist today. The problem is that most of them are quiet. Why would someone post on a tiny forum, since almost nobody would read it? Most people don't, they either write in their journal, or post in a big forum where they're more likely to get attention.
I think reachability specifically is the biggest issue, because you can make a forum invite-only, and this effectively reduces the amount of bad content to whatever you can manage (too overwhelmed? Invite less people). But people are even less likely to get an invitation to a forum, even if it's as simple as sending an email.
When I think of creating a forum, I worry about strongly-worded emails from the law-enforcement and/or my hosting-provider. But I don't worry about prosecution, I worry about the emotional toll of just seeing those letters, the emotional toll of seeing the content, the effort of finding and removing it, and the effort of blocking (mundane) spam. Even then I'd still host a forum if I expected it to become popular, but I expect it to become deserted.
Bad content is more than a legal issue. If you have a public forum, you don't want people publicly posting hate and gore, being creepy, and DM-ing others threats. Your viewers will see hate/gore/creeps/threats, leave your site, tell others not to visit, and if the content is bad enough be scarred. You will be scarred. Your site will become filled with awful people. Then there's the issue of spam, which you must block simply because it will use up all your site's resources.
But even with those issues, there are many, many independent platforms that exist today. The problem is that most of them are quiet. Why would someone post on a tiny forum, since almost nobody would read it? Most people don't, they either write in their journal, or post in a big forum where they're more likely to get attention.
I think reachability specifically is the biggest issue, because you can make a forum invite-only, and this effectively reduces the amount of bad content to whatever you can manage (too overwhelmed? Invite less people). But people are even less likely to get an invitation to a forum, even if it's as simple as sending an email.
When I think of creating a forum, I worry about strongly-worded emails from the law-enforcement and/or my hosting-provider. But I don't worry about prosecution, I worry about the emotional toll of just seeing those letters, the emotional toll of seeing the content, the effort of finding and removing it, and the effort of blocking (mundane) spam. Even then I'd still host a forum if I expected it to become popular, but I expect it to become deserted.