I live in USA and my servers were located in USA due to the rather lax laws on content/speech. Sadly, there have been several decrees and federal laws passed as of late that have made what used to be allowed speech into illegal speech. We had a very lax attitude towards users (you can host whatever here, you run your own sub-forums, admins do not get involved in your forum) but we found ourselves flooded with refugees and users from the great purges that happened during the end of 2019-2020. So over night we gained a lot of users and had to spend a lot of money buying new servers and refactoring our software to support them.
When they came they brought a lot of attention with them. So after about a week of good times we found ourselves flooded with bots, bad actors and federal agents. All of which would post illegal content 24/7 then try to offer their services as moderators and demand rule changes. If you did try to crack down on things with a minor rule change they'd then turn around and concern troll. They basically only existed to rile up the real users and attempt to make them leave. They learned the sleeping habits of moderation pretty quickly and would wait until we were asleep to flood the place with various types of content I'd rather not talk about. Every night there were floods of it. If I adjusted my sleeping habits to deal with it they'd just re-learn them and flood again whenever I did try to snooze.
I am convinced it's impossible to both grow a community organically beyond about 10 users now or moderate it. We had several instances of people signing up for moderating duties that were just fine when we were watching them but would cause havoc as soon as they were left alone. Only to jump to a new IP range when their access was revoked and try to do it all over again. Along with a constant flood of people trying to hack into the servers and short of that launching DDOS attacks. Whoever was doing it had unlimited access to resources and domestic IP addresses. If you blocked one IP range on a temp. basis they'd just switch to another that shared IP range with most of the domestic ISPs within the three-four countries most of our users were from. It took them about 3 months to turn the place into a ghost town. At our height we were serving over 1 million users daily. Which is pretty impressive considering it was set-up for about 20 initially and we never expected it to attract more than that. But when some large platforms got taken down during the havoc that was late 2019 tons of people showed up with no other place to go because censorship was already so oppressive most everywhere else.
You will toe the line these days or you will find yourself in a similar situation to what we faced. I wasn't the only one that got a knock at the door. The other two main admins did too and they lived overseas. We didn't even host what I would have considered very controversial topics at the time. This place wasn't becoming a watering hole for every covid conspiracy theorist or anything like that. It was just uncensored non-political discussion about various topics.
One thing I should mention; When they came to talk to me (and I shouldn't have talked to them at all) they mentioned a
certain family by name and seemed very interested in that particular area of discussion. At the time there were what I guess about 20-50 regular users that were following the opioid lawsuits very closely and discussion got heated. To the point where some of them were tracking the daily comings and goings of that family. I got the impression that they were very pissed off about that and used their money+power as a flex to send the authorities to scare me. Basically; "We know where you live now. It'd be a shame if something happened to your family".
I have been involved with running forums and other discussion platforms on the internet since the mid-90s. I've owned and help run several websites larger than BL and even larger than the one I was operating in late 2019-early 2020. Some of which had more controversial discussion than this one did. I've had to deal with law enforcement multiple times over the years. But never anything like this.
In the end they seized my domain names, servers and ran it as a honeypot for several months afterwards. I yanked down the warrant canary that was hosted on a backup domain they didn't get access to right away. Technically that wasn't against the law but they argued that I'd violated the law when I did that because I was under a gag order after they seized everything. I suspect it was also them that routed data through my LAN. Since that caused me a lot of trouble that I'd rather not discuss. Suffice to say though the Federal Government claims they consider my penis as a deadly weapon and that I threatened someone with it. The only thing they could have had access to on that network was the ISP supplied modem+router combo. Since everything beyond it was locked down tight behind an OpenBSD powered firewall running on old hardware that's claimed not to have back doors in the CPU. I did audit everything on my LAN and nothing was broken into that I could see. But it's easy enough to purge log files once you gain root so I didn't really trust any of that hardware afterwards.
Not that I got to keep it for much longer. It was only about 2 weeks after they seized my servers that they came back with a warrant and seized all my personal hardware. In addition they harassed my entire family including people that didn't live in the same household. Along with several of my friends and associates. I spent some time in county jail (no prison thank God) and was released on probation with a stipulation that I was not allowed to touch a keyboard for 2 years. The Government basically ruined my life because I gave people a place to talk on the internet that didn't practice any form of censorship. We had 2 rules: Don't post anything that is illegal under US law (3 things basically) and don't be an asshole. Beyond that you could run your own section however you pleased or say whatever you wanted. If you didn't like how someone ran their section we'd give you your own. We started with 4 sub-forums and within a few weeks we had thousands (most hidden) being used by millions of people. Can't give you exact numbers on users because we encouraged people to use tor, VPNs, and didn't require logging into an account to participate (unless a section decided to restrict access like that).
I will never attempt to run a forum again. I am convinced it's impossible now to run any place with meaningful discussion on the web now. If you're interested in this I would advise attempting to do it outside of http protocol. The only places left that aren't really being watched like a hawk and not instantly flooded with bot farms are stuff like Fidonet, old school BBS systems and maybe USENET. The web itself is broken for a variety of different reasons. Main one being if you don't put your stuff behind a CDN you can expect constant DDOS attacks. But all CDNs require handing over your TLS/SSL keys making any "encryption" effectively useless and broken. We got around this by buying several VPSs and setting up our own CDN. But it cost a lot of money.
Good luck. I hope you have better luck than I do.