France is probably among the least bad core west countries from my admittedly casual understanding of things (I am not a lawyer or expert on internet rights, law, etc). At least in so far as France doesn’t extradite citizens under any circumstances for the US (Polanski is still sitting there despite warrants for him) and because they have nukes they have some airs of being somewhat independent of and not totally subjugated to the US like most Euro-vassals who spend their evenings sobbing about how to better please the US and fearing the imminent Russian hoards who will surely appear any day now. That said a terrorism designation and request like they did here might still get the French to cooperate especially since the website owners/holders are as far as I know not French citizens so not strictly entitled to full defense of the French state of their rights.

US registrar is indeed not great but I believe the US could seize the domain regardless as it’s dot net address which I believe is under US legal jurisdiction. You’d need to move to a country level domain held by a country that is independent of the US and wouldn’t seize a domain even if it was run by foreigners they couldn’t care less about. At that point you’re down to Russia, China (including Hong Kong), Vietnam (maybe, they’ve done some piracy cooperation with the west and might play ball since it involves non-nationals), and then all the domains commonly used by criminal elements like pirate sites which tend to resist most normal attempts at taking them down. Even then if the US pulls out the big sanctions guns you’d have to hope the registrar does no business at all with the US of note and doesn’t care about being sanctioned and for that only really Russian and Chinese registrars are applicable.

As I understand (just recalling last time this was discussed) it it’s not practical to host in Russia because you need Russian ID and someone in Russia to be point of contact and/or technical owner of the servers themselves, that someone could do whatever they want with the contents at any time and there would be no stopping them. Russian authorities may also take a dim view of some of the anti-Putin, pro-communist, pro-USSR restoration sentiment here to say nothing of all the LGBTQ+ content that would be against the law there.

Hosting in China I believe has similar problems of local point of contact, ID, and technical ownership of the server and its contents with the additional problem of the GFW. Probably if we were wealthy we could hire a law firm in China to act as the holder of the website and register all the relevant paperwork and host out of Hong Kong but even then the foreign real ownership and usage might present a problem. I don’t know. I know they’d bop you with the hammer without a second thought or a second chance the instant they learned of the drugs community but getting rid of that would seem a small price to pay to not have comrades black-bagged and renditioned if that plan is otherwise found viable.

In the meantime it would be nice if the admins review security and privacy posture, tighten up automatic deletion or removal of IP addresses in any logging facilities that would enable post-seizure them to connect specific accounts to real people’s IPs and thus their speech could be used to start a prosecution or worse.

We should also consider the reality that with AI-assisted hacking some independent, zealous, but well connected to DOD/FBI/etc reactionary group could hack the site, dump logs and IP addresses and hand them over for investigation to the feds. Another reason to absolutely minimize the logs held (though in such an instance they could install their own logging facilities as long as they can keep the compromise unnoticed for a little while).