5 ms·

What Is the "MFFAM" Policy?

104 points by Tomte 2y ago

neilv 2y ago
This is kinda neat. > 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation. This is vulnerable to "false flag" abuse, from faux-morons. > 1. The recipient organization does share our values. This partly mitigates that risk. Faux-morons can still generate more funds for recipients chosen by the site, and/or hurt the profitability of the site, but at least it's for causes within the values of the site.
- willvarfar 2y ago
  Wouldn't faux-morons be better off just giving the money to their target charities? Why set up a website pushing the agenda they don't support, and pay to do that, in order to get some of that money they pay be siphoned away to causes they do support?
  - neilv 2y ago
    (Sorry I said "site", which was confusing; I meant nearlyfreespeech.net.) I'm not certain, but I read the following part to probably mean that nearlyfreespeech.net donates their own estimated profit from providing service to the morons in question: > When we find a repugnant site on our service, we mark the account. We receive reports about all payments to such accounts, and we take a portion of that money larger than the amount of estimated profit and we donate it to the best organization we can find.
    - graemep 2y ago
      Yes, but their estimated profit is less than the revenue from providing the service, so the morons have still spent more than their target gets.
      - neilv 2y ago
        Thanks, I missed that. (I stupidly commented while waking up.) Someone trying to abuse this policy might have additional reasons to false-flag, but I no longer think that that angle on policy abuse is a significant risk.
    - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      Their own estimated profit comes from the entity that hosts the content, right? So if I want to trick them into supporting a charity, I open an account, give nearlyfreespeech x$, they make x-y$ profit, and then give that to a charity. I've just lost y$ on that transaction, compared to just giving it to the charity directly.
jibcage 2y ago
Nearly free speech for me is one of those services still (excellently) run by nerds. Its no-frills, functional UI reminds me of the old internet before services and sites began coalescing into bigger, faceless, soulless monoliths. I didn’t know about this policy before today, but now I love them even more. If you’re looking for a place to host your next project or domain, I can’t recommend them enough!
- closewith 2y ago
  I put NFS is the same category as Tarsnap. While I love the aesthetic and mission, I long ago moved away because the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable. As NFS say, they're a service for smart people and while I hesitate to call myself smart, whatever neurons I do have are better spent thinking about my family than obscure service offerings.
  - makizar 2y ago
    > the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable Could you explain that in a bit more detail ? I used both OVH, Google Cloud and NFS to host small websites. With OVH and Google, even for small things like setting up DNS I’d get lost in a hellish kafkian maze of help pages, wheras the NFS FAQ is the best one I’ve see. I have yet to find an issue it doesn’t cover. Pricing-wise, I’ve found it pretty transparent, and overall, dirt-cheap.
- on_the_train 2y ago
  They are great, but the speeds are sometimes atrocious. Too bad to even host my completely static personal site, because potential employers would have to wait up to 10 seconds for it to load. And ftp connections often fail completely. Bummer, really
- radicality 2y ago
  +1 to nfs. I use them for my static site/blog since 2013, and think I haven’t touched the control panel for at least 5 years and perhaps even longer (apart from topping up some $ to the account), and it’s been working great. I haven’t updated my site for a long time and for a while I even forgot where it’s hosted, and everything still working fine without intervention.
silisili 2y ago
Sounds kinda terrible to me. If you don't want to host content, don't. I fully support that decision. But don't pretend to be free speech defenders then siphon money to fight your own customer because it makes you feel better. It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan. And judging by prices last time I looked, that's about right.
- Thorrez 2y ago
  >But don't pretend to be free speech defenders I don't quite understand what you're saying. Does donating to a charity they support make them not free speech defenders? >It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan. They didn't say they're donating all the revenue. Just a portion of the revenue that's a bit higher than the profit. So if the margin is 5%, then they might donate 6% of the revenue from that customer.
  - silisili 2y ago
    > Does donating to a charity they support make them not free speech defenders The policy is not so innocent. It's not just good charities they support, it's charities that have a belief opposite your own, if they disagree. Let's say you were really(and rightly) against pineapple on pizza. And you find a host saying they're OK with anything, have at it. So you make one. Little do you know, they are taking your money and donating to those pineapple on pizza places. Yes, it's contrived. Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal. I'm not saying it should be, but that it shouldn't be lauded, either.
    - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      "It's not just good charities they support" I'm not sure what you mean by "good charities." They're supporting charities they agree with ("The recipient organization does share our values") to counteract speech that they disagree with. So by definition, these are "good charities" from their point of view.
    - luckylion 2y ago
Innocuous42 2y ago
[flagged]
- throw310822 2y ago
  Ironic since the ADL is a staunch defender of Israel, a country whose leader is wanted for crimes against humanity.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    That a country's government is guilty of somethihg is unrelated as to whether that country "deserves" to exist, and super-duper unrelated to how people sharing the ethnicity of that country's citizens should be treated. In other words, Jews in other countries have nothing to do with Israel and nobody should harrass them for what Israel's doing... nor harrass them just because they're Jewish (which is sadly still common)
    - wffurr 2y ago
      I am glad you can make that distinction, but the ADL demonstrably does not. Criticism of Israel’s government and policy is conflated with antisemitism. It’s infuriating.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  "Which includes the people who run this site." How so? They're publishing things on their service they disagree with, so they clearly believe in free speech for people they disagree with. "are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC" This is not clear to me. The SPLC has never taken any steps to criminalize speech or advocate for government censorship, as far as I can tell. In fact, it is just exercising its own right to free speech when it critiques what it perceives as others' harmful speech. That's the whole point of free speech, you counteract speech you don't like with speech you do like. Of course, you are also just engaging in free speech when you accuse them of being against free speech, and I also just engage in free speech when I disagree with you, so it's all good :-)
tzury 2y ago
Did you all noticed the hash? https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisThatsWhy They got a great sense of humor.
- TheMayorOfDunce 2y ago
  Honestly that’s just embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for them in the way I’d be embarrassed for someone still injecting “Nope, Chuck Testa!” or “an arrow to the knee!” in human conversations in 2025. Oh wow, an internet crusader who especially hates “Nazis”. How unique and cool. I wonder if the writer also courageously boasts about “punching Nazis”, both in combat and even “in the street”. If only I could be so brave (rather I am a mewling coward who dares not insult the mighty Nazi global hoarde, and certainly not publicly! They might throw me in one of their odious concentration camps!)
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    In principle you are right, but for some reason there are people who are vocally offended/displeased by the "fuck nazis" slogan. That's weird to me, because as you say this should be uncontroversial and yet here we are having this conversation. I think this is because this is not actually about the words itself. Similarly, everyone agrees that black lives matter[1], but that words imply a certain political alignment that the person you're talking with may not subscribe. Similarly, by saying "fuck nazis" you will get reactions from people who, in principle, don't like literal nazis too, but feel targeted by that sentence anyway. Sorry for my rambling thoughts. [1] as in, nobody sane would unironically agree with "black lives don't matter"
finiche 2y ago
Haloy
Mistletoe 2y ago
The amount of money made from those sites (and spent for good) is surely infinitesimal to the bad they do by spreading hate. Much better to just not host the content. I don’t believe in slippery slope nonsense, it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people and no I don’t believe in publishing that.
- craftkiller 2y ago
  > it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people Is it? If you just mean explicit "lets go kill <group>" messages, then sure. But, we also have: - People who think the existence of trans people is harming children - People who think alternative medical practices like homeopathy is harming people - People who think vaccines are harming people - People who think 5G towers are harming people - People who think discussing methods of suicide is harming people - People who think abortion is harming people
  - stevage 2y ago
    And it gets a lot greyer than that.
  - valicord 2y ago
    One of these is not like the others
    - craftkiller 2y ago
      I think if you ask enough people, you will find people will have differing answers on which one(s) are different than the others. I intentionally included both things I agree with and disagree with.
- xigoi 2y ago
  A hosting service is not a publisher. They don’t want to restrict speech, but still want to punish hateful sites, and this is the compromise they came up with.
lanternfish 2y ago
This relies on an EA adjacent market fallacy where we can resolve all moral action down to funding actors of various moral alignments - there's no reason to believe that the end utility (or whatever metric) of the action is linear w.r.t amount of cash moved. Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever. This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk. (edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)
- mquander 2y ago
  Although I agree with you that there's no reason to expect an equal dollar amount to produce a balanced outcome, I disagree completely with the conclusion. The paying party is a random website saying an offensive opinion, and the receiving party is a professional activist organization designed to turn dollars into utility. Why would you figure that the former is exerting more influence per dollar?
  - lanternfish 2y ago
    Maybe its unfair pessimism, but I definitely believe that Kiwifarms (ex) is way more efficient at turning money into targeted hate than - say - the Trevor Project is at countering it. I guess my sense is that if you actually want to counter this kind of harm, you have to do so on a fundamentally structural level, and the host in question is the structural enabler.
    - immibis 2y ago
      And some of their listed organizations also turn money into targeted hate. So the offensive website gets double impact.
- makizar 2y ago
  I don’t agree, the FAQ answer doesn’t relate « moral alignment » to monetary value. I think it simply states that advocating for free speech doesn’t mean falling into relativism, assigning the same value to all positions and endorsing the most extreme ones. Pretty refreshing in the current context.
ginko 2y ago
I worry that this policy contributes to the overall polarization by amplifying the loudest most extreme voices on both sides of an issue.
tobystic 2y ago
I used to volunteer for a NGO that sends books to Prisoners across the penitentiaries . We sent out thousands per month . We had a code called BBG for books containing Boobs, Butts and Genitalia. Sadly this means manga comics and Biology textbooks are not allowed or ripped to rid of those contents
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cudgy 2y ago
“The best organization in any given case meets two criteria: 1. The recipient organization does share our values. 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.” This seems flawed on so many fronts. This is likely just donating money to your own favorite causes. And if they are not causes that you have already vetted, how do you know that organization you found is not worse than the one you’re trying to punish? It would take a good deal of research to figure this out. What percentage of the values of the organization need to meet your values? Virtually no organization perfectly matches the values for anyone. Furthermore, who is “our”? Does everyone in your company or organization have the same exact values?
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  This happens all the time outside of webhosting. The products you buy to eat, be clothed, and be sheltered are produced by companies that may lobby for laws against your values. As one has a choice to not use this webhosting provider, one also has a choice in what to buy with the aforementioned products required for survival--that is, if that choice hasn't been taken away by a legal monopoly situation (e.g. ISPs), industry consolidation, regulatory capture, etc.
Suppafly 2y ago
I don't really get the point, it'd make more sense to just not host these people than to take their money and turn around and donate it to someone else.
rkagerer 2y ago
Stands for "Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons" They take profits from a flagged subscriber (loosely defined as one they find "repugnant") and donate it to whatever organization they can find which is most anathemic to the offender.

104 points by Tomte 2y ago

This is kinda neat. > 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation. This is vulnerable to "false flag" abuse, from faux-morons. > 1. The recipient organization does share our values. This partly mitigates that risk. Faux-morons can still generate more funds for recipients chosen by the site, and/or hurt the profitability of the site, but at least it's for causes within the values of the site.

willvarfar 2y ago
Wouldn't faux-morons be better off just giving the money to their target charities? Why set up a website pushing the agenda they don't support, and pay to do that, in order to get some of that money they pay be siphoned away to causes they do support?
- neilv 2y ago
  (Sorry I said "site", which was confusing; I meant nearlyfreespeech.net.) I'm not certain, but I read the following part to probably mean that nearlyfreespeech.net donates their own estimated profit from providing service to the morons in question: > When we find a repugnant site on our service, we mark the account. We receive reports about all payments to such accounts, and we take a portion of that money larger than the amount of estimated profit and we donate it to the best organization we can find.
  - graemep 2y ago
    Yes, but their estimated profit is less than the revenue from providing the service, so the morons have still spent more than their target gets.
    - neilv 2y ago
      Thanks, I missed that. (I stupidly commented while waking up.) Someone trying to abuse this policy might have additional reasons to false-flag, but I no longer think that that angle on policy abuse is a significant risk.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    Their own estimated profit comes from the entity that hosts the content, right? So if I want to trick them into supporting a charity, I open an account, give nearlyfreespeech x$, they make x-y$ profit, and then give that to a charity. I've just lost y$ on that transaction, compared to just giving it to the charity directly.

jibcage 2y ago

Nearly free speech for me is one of those services still (excellently) run by nerds. Its no-frills, functional UI reminds me of the old internet before services and sites began coalescing into bigger, faceless, soulless monoliths. I didn’t know about this policy before today, but now I love them even more. If you’re looking for a place to host your next project or domain, I can’t recommend them enough!

closewith 2y ago
I put NFS is the same category as Tarsnap. While I love the aesthetic and mission, I long ago moved away because the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable. As NFS say, they're a service for smart people and while I hesitate to call myself smart, whatever neurons I do have are better spent thinking about my family than obscure service offerings.
- makizar 2y ago
  > the UX is just so obtuse and pricing unpredictable Could you explain that in a bit more detail ? I used both OVH, Google Cloud and NFS to host small websites. With OVH and Google, even for small things like setting up DNS I’d get lost in a hellish kafkian maze of help pages, wheras the NFS FAQ is the best one I’ve see. I have yet to find an issue it doesn’t cover. Pricing-wise, I’ve found it pretty transparent, and overall, dirt-cheap.
on_the_train 2y ago
They are great, but the speeds are sometimes atrocious. Too bad to even host my completely static personal site, because potential employers would have to wait up to 10 seconds for it to load. And ftp connections often fail completely. Bummer, really
radicality 2y ago
+1 to nfs. I use them for my static site/blog since 2013, and think I haven’t touched the control panel for at least 5 years and perhaps even longer (apart from topping up some $ to the account), and it’s been working great. I haven’t updated my site for a long time and for a while I even forgot where it’s hosted, and everything still working fine without intervention.

silisili 2y ago

Sounds kinda terrible to me. If you don't want to host content, don't. I fully support that decision. But don't pretend to be free speech defenders then siphon money to fight your own customer because it makes you feel better. It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan. And judging by prices last time I looked, that's about right.

Thorrez 2y ago
>But don't pretend to be free speech defenders I don't quite understand what you're saying. Does donating to a charity they support make them not free speech defenders? >It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan. They didn't say they're donating all the revenue. Just a portion of the revenue that's a bit higher than the profit. So if the margin is 5%, then they might donate 6% of the revenue from that customer.
- silisili 2y ago
  > Does donating to a charity they support make them not free speech defenders The policy is not so innocent. It's not just good charities they support, it's charities that have a belief opposite your own, if they disagree. Let's say you were really(and rightly) against pineapple on pizza. And you find a host saying they're OK with anything, have at it. So you make one. Little do you know, they are taking your money and donating to those pineapple on pizza places. Yes, it's contrived. Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal. I'm not saying it should be, but that it shouldn't be lauded, either.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    "It's not just good charities they support" I'm not sure what you mean by "good charities." They're supporting charities they agree with ("The recipient organization does share our values") to counteract speech that they disagree with. So by definition, these are "good charities" from their point of view.
  - luckylion 2y ago

Innocuous42 2y ago

[flagged]

throw310822 2y ago
Ironic since the ADL is a staunch defender of Israel, a country whose leader is wanted for crimes against humanity.
- amiga386 2y ago
  That a country's government is guilty of somethihg is unrelated as to whether that country "deserves" to exist, and super-duper unrelated to how people sharing the ethnicity of that country's citizens should be treated. In other words, Jews in other countries have nothing to do with Israel and nobody should harrass them for what Israel's doing... nor harrass them just because they're Jewish (which is sadly still common)
  - wffurr 2y ago
    I am glad you can make that distinction, but the ADL demonstrably does not. Criticism of Israel’s government and policy is conflated with antisemitism. It’s infuriating.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
"Which includes the people who run this site." How so? They're publishing things on their service they disagree with, so they clearly believe in free speech for people they disagree with. "are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC" This is not clear to me. The SPLC has never taken any steps to criminalize speech or advocate for government censorship, as far as I can tell. In fact, it is just exercising its own right to free speech when it critiques what it perceives as others' harmful speech. That's the whole point of free speech, you counteract speech you don't like with speech you do like. Of course, you are also just engaging in free speech when you accuse them of being against free speech, and I also just engage in free speech when I disagree with you, so it's all good :-)

tzury 2y ago

Did you all noticed the hash? https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisThatsWhy They got a great sense of humor.

TheMayorOfDunce 2y ago
Honestly that’s just embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for them in the way I’d be embarrassed for someone still injecting “Nope, Chuck Testa!” or “an arrow to the knee!” in human conversations in 2025. Oh wow, an internet crusader who especially hates “Nazis”. How unique and cool. I wonder if the writer also courageously boasts about “punching Nazis”, both in combat and even “in the street”. If only I could be so brave (rather I am a mewling coward who dares not insult the mighty Nazi global hoarde, and certainly not publicly! They might throw me in one of their odious concentration camps!)
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  In principle you are right, but for some reason there are people who are vocally offended/displeased by the "fuck nazis" slogan. That's weird to me, because as you say this should be uncontroversial and yet here we are having this conversation. I think this is because this is not actually about the words itself. Similarly, everyone agrees that black lives matter[1], but that words imply a certain political alignment that the person you're talking with may not subscribe. Similarly, by saying "fuck nazis" you will get reactions from people who, in principle, don't like literal nazis too, but feel targeted by that sentence anyway. Sorry for my rambling thoughts. [1] as in, nobody sane would unironically agree with "black lives don't matter"

finiche 2y ago

Haloy

Mistletoe 2y ago

The amount of money made from those sites (and spent for good) is surely infinitesimal to the bad they do by spreading hate. Much better to just not host the content. I don’t believe in slippery slope nonsense, it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people and no I don’t believe in publishing that.

craftkiller 2y ago
> it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people Is it? If you just mean explicit "lets go kill <group>" messages, then sure. But, we also have: - People who think the existence of trans people is harming children - People who think alternative medical practices like homeopathy is harming people - People who think vaccines are harming people - People who think 5G towers are harming people - People who think discussing methods of suicide is harming people - People who think abortion is harming people
- stevage 2y ago
  And it gets a lot greyer than that.
- valicord 2y ago
  One of these is not like the others
  - craftkiller 2y ago
    I think if you ask enough people, you will find people will have differing answers on which one(s) are different than the others. I intentionally included both things I agree with and disagree with.
xigoi 2y ago
A hosting service is not a publisher. They don’t want to restrict speech, but still want to punish hateful sites, and this is the compromise they came up with.

lanternfish 2y ago

This relies on an EA adjacent market fallacy where we can resolve all moral action down to funding actors of various moral alignments - there's no reason to believe that the end utility (or whatever metric) of the action is linear w.r.t amount of cash moved. Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever. This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk. (edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)

mquander 2y ago
Although I agree with you that there's no reason to expect an equal dollar amount to produce a balanced outcome, I disagree completely with the conclusion. The paying party is a random website saying an offensive opinion, and the receiving party is a professional activist organization designed to turn dollars into utility. Why would you figure that the former is exerting more influence per dollar?
- lanternfish 2y ago
  Maybe its unfair pessimism, but I definitely believe that Kiwifarms (ex) is way more efficient at turning money into targeted hate than - say - the Trevor Project is at countering it. I guess my sense is that if you actually want to counter this kind of harm, you have to do so on a fundamentally structural level, and the host in question is the structural enabler.
  - immibis 2y ago
    And some of their listed organizations also turn money into targeted hate. So the offensive website gets double impact.
makizar 2y ago
I don’t agree, the FAQ answer doesn’t relate « moral alignment » to monetary value. I think it simply states that advocating for free speech doesn’t mean falling into relativism, assigning the same value to all positions and endorsing the most extreme ones. Pretty refreshing in the current context.

ginko 2y ago

I worry that this policy contributes to the overall polarization by amplifying the loudest most extreme voices on both sides of an issue.

tobystic 2y ago

I used to volunteer for a NGO that sends books to Prisoners across the penitentiaries . We sent out thousands per month . We had a code called BBG for books containing Boobs, Butts and Genitalia. Sadly this means manga comics and Biology textbooks are not allowed or ripped to rid of those contents

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cudgy 2y ago

“The best organization in any given case meets two criteria: 1. The recipient organization does share our values. 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.” This seems flawed on so many fronts. This is likely just donating money to your own favorite causes. And if they are not causes that you have already vetted, how do you know that organization you found is not worse than the one you’re trying to punish? It would take a good deal of research to figure this out. What percentage of the values of the organization need to meet your values? Virtually no organization perfectly matches the values for anyone. Furthermore, who is “our”? Does everyone in your company or organization have the same exact values?

RiverCrochet 2y ago
This happens all the time outside of webhosting. The products you buy to eat, be clothed, and be sheltered are produced by companies that may lobby for laws against your values. As one has a choice to not use this webhosting provider, one also has a choice in what to buy with the aforementioned products required for survival--that is, if that choice hasn't been taken away by a legal monopoly situation (e.g. ISPs), industry consolidation, regulatory capture, etc.

Suppafly 2y ago

I don't really get the point, it'd make more sense to just not host these people than to take their money and turn around and donate it to someone else.

rkagerer 2y ago

Stands for "Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons" They take profits from a flagged subscriber (loosely defined as one they find "repugnant") and donate it to whatever organization they can find which is most anathemic to the offender.