3 ms·

Salutations HN, I am Martin, the founder of PinePage. Our team has been working on creating a Patreon alternative that celebrates differences and controversy. W

Salutations HN, I am Martin, the founder of PinePage. Our team has been working on creating a Patreon alternative that celebrates differences and controversy. We want to be a part of crafting a world where people can create without fear of exclusion. We take pride in being a Free Speech friendly platform - see our Free Speech Manifesto v1.0 (pinepage.com) and uphold a Zero Ban Policy. On PinePage users can create a free website in seconds, engage with their audience through a forum or blog, accept donations, or design membership tiers, all on their own domain. We welcome all types of content, no matter the genre; Political, Religious, Adult, Explicit…no content category is off limits as long as it doesn’t effectively break the laws of the jurisdiction under which our platform operates. It’s clear the consequences of censorship are far more dangerous than those of allowing everyone to freely state their beliefs. The past has shown us, time and time again, the effects of silencing the visionaries. Those in power decide what gets written in the history books, and everyone else’s views get crushed under the weight of censorship. We might be legally obligated to hide content in direct violation of the law, but your account would not be suspended, nor would you face an overall platform expulsion and demonetization. Feedback from the HN crowd is often super harsh but beneficial, thus we’d love to hear your feedback about https://pinepage.com https://pinepage.com either here on HN or directly to me martin@mail.pinepage.com Thanks!

john-doe 5y ago
> no content category is off limits as long as it doesn’t effectively break the laws of the jurisdiction under which our platform operate You should then indicate clearly in the About page in which country your company, or servers, are located?
- pinepage 5y ago
  Great point! Most of our hosting happens in Germany, but our official company registration is in Estonia, presently indicated in the Contact Us page on our website.
  - stevenicr 5y ago
    I'm trying to remember why we've always been told to not do hosting in Germany (adult sites) - something about laws there that are anti-free speech and they have to respond to requests .. something.. it's been a while. I would look towards having servers in several countries and germany would not be one of them. I'd get off cloudflare too - but you are going to need a dns that can take DDos attacks, as well as attacks of the woke mob warriors - so they are going to try to get your registrar to take you out too, your hosting, your hosting country / govs.. their def gonna get stripe to kick you quickly. they are going to hack you, and try to release a DB with customer's doxx plus the donaters.. they will prob try to get visa/ms to ban you and maybe the us gov's int block list, whatever that stuff is called. with all that being said - there is a need for this and lots of people will use it if the fees are less than the other options. I've been kicking ideas similar around for a while now - I can see this being used in many forms. If you are pre-prepped for the mobs of haters, I'd like to see this succeed. not sure if pornhub got a new processor that does the visa/mc - if so I'd chat with them. crypto is sadly the main need here. I'd split the system up into like 5 different companies - running different jurisdictions - this will help deflect some of the hate and hopefully keep any one fail from taking the whole system down - this is just what I see as the future sadly.
    - john-doe 5y ago
      Germany is pretty strict with copyrighted content in general (don't even think about torrenting a movie there). They even comply with DMCA takedown requests.
    - pinepage 5y ago
      Hey Steven thanks for your comments. Germany is quite interesting. There is some restrictions and we are aware of them, but at the same time Germany also gives a tonnes of protection. We hedge our bets by making it easy to switch servers to any other place. Cloudflare is only used for landing page and admin of pages. The pages are hosted on our own servers. About hacking, it has always been this way and no matter what business security should be of high importance. They can and probably will ban our Stripe account. That's why every creator will have to connect their own payment providers. This means they could shut down payments to us, but not all creators. A lot of other services uses one payment provider for all transactions, but this makes them vulnerable as their whole business can get shutdown if they don't do exactly what the payment provider says. Crypto fixes a lot of this. We opened a can of worms, and it will be tough, but I doubt we are so much trouble as you expect. Rumble, BitChute, Odysee, Locals are all in the same sphere and they had troubles, but not as much as you'd expect. Thanks again for the comment Steve!
ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
Do you take a commission or is the subscription the full cost of using your platform?
- pinepage 5y ago
  The cost of the monthly subscription is the full cost. All creators would be receiving their earnings directly from their subscribers to their own accounts. Not only that, at the moment we are scouting for suitable content creators who are willing to endorse our platform and use it entirely for free as well as earn a commission on the income we generate as a result of their active referral. Could you be one of them?

john-doe 5y ago

> no content category is off limits as long as it doesn’t effectively break the laws of the jurisdiction under which our platform operate You should then indicate clearly in the About page in which country your company, or servers, are located?

pinepage 5y ago
Great point! Most of our hosting happens in Germany, but our official company registration is in Estonia, presently indicated in the Contact Us page on our website.
- stevenicr 5y ago
  I'm trying to remember why we've always been told to not do hosting in Germany (adult sites) - something about laws there that are anti-free speech and they have to respond to requests .. something.. it's been a while. I would look towards having servers in several countries and germany would not be one of them. I'd get off cloudflare too - but you are going to need a dns that can take DDos attacks, as well as attacks of the woke mob warriors - so they are going to try to get your registrar to take you out too, your hosting, your hosting country / govs.. their def gonna get stripe to kick you quickly. they are going to hack you, and try to release a DB with customer's doxx plus the donaters.. they will prob try to get visa/ms to ban you and maybe the us gov's int block list, whatever that stuff is called. with all that being said - there is a need for this and lots of people will use it if the fees are less than the other options. I've been kicking ideas similar around for a while now - I can see this being used in many forms. If you are pre-prepped for the mobs of haters, I'd like to see this succeed. not sure if pornhub got a new processor that does the visa/mc - if so I'd chat with them. crypto is sadly the main need here. I'd split the system up into like 5 different companies - running different jurisdictions - this will help deflect some of the hate and hopefully keep any one fail from taking the whole system down - this is just what I see as the future sadly.
  - john-doe 5y ago
    Germany is pretty strict with copyrighted content in general (don't even think about torrenting a movie there). They even comply with DMCA takedown requests.
  - pinepage 5y ago
    Hey Steven thanks for your comments. Germany is quite interesting. There is some restrictions and we are aware of them, but at the same time Germany also gives a tonnes of protection. We hedge our bets by making it easy to switch servers to any other place. Cloudflare is only used for landing page and admin of pages. The pages are hosted on our own servers. About hacking, it has always been this way and no matter what business security should be of high importance. They can and probably will ban our Stripe account. That's why every creator will have to connect their own payment providers. This means they could shut down payments to us, but not all creators. A lot of other services uses one payment provider for all transactions, but this makes them vulnerable as their whole business can get shutdown if they don't do exactly what the payment provider says. Crypto fixes a lot of this. We opened a can of worms, and it will be tough, but I doubt we are so much trouble as you expect. Rumble, BitChute, Odysee, Locals are all in the same sphere and they had troubles, but not as much as you'd expect. Thanks again for the comment Steve!

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago

Do you take a commission or is the subscription the full cost of using your platform?

pinepage 5y ago
The cost of the monthly subscription is the full cost. All creators would be receiving their earnings directly from their subscribers to their own accounts. Not only that, at the moment we are scouting for suitable content creators who are willing to endorse our platform and use it entirely for free as well as earn a commission on the income we generate as a result of their active referral. Could you be one of them?