About NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is about three things: fairness, innovation, and free speech.

Fairness

Our baseline pricing is designed to recover the basic costs associated with "keeping the lights on." What that means is that if every member of our service set up only sites and services that subsequently got no activity, our goal would be for them to pay exactly enough to cover the costs we incur. In other words, at such a basic level, we would pay our bills, everybody involved would make a reasonable wage, and there wouldn't be any money left over at all. Everybody pays their way, and nothing more.

Then, when sites get bigger and become more successful, that's when we start to profit. That's the essence of our intention that "our success depends entirely on your success!" However, beyond the occasional pizza, we tend to reinvest what profits we make, be it spending money on innovation, newer equipment sooner, or similar improvements. No matter what we do or how far we come, our list of ways to make the service better always seems to gain items faster than we can cross them off. We also need to keep enough money around to protect against our customers getting financially DDOSed by anyone who can afford lawyers.

Innovation

Like most web hosts, we use and depend on a lot of open-source software. Unlike most web hosts, we don't depend on a proprietary control panel written by somebody else that dictates what sorts of services we can and can't offer. We use a clustered hosting network that turns downtimes that would last hours or days if your site was dependent on a specific web server into minutes, or no outage at all. On our network, moving sites that are misbehaving where they can't hurt others is the rule, not the exception. Those are some benefits of innovation.

The flip side of this is that our interface and features were entirely developed by people who march to the beat of their own drummer. It does things that others can't and doesn't do things others can. While the result of that isn't for everyone, a lot of our members are kindred spirits, and they like the idea that supporting us as we chart our own course helps us support them as they chart theirs.

Free Speech

Free speech isn't as popular as it used to be. It doesn't poll well among younger people, according to some news outlets. Admittedly, they're the sort of news outlets which thrive on hand-wringing about what's losing popularity among younger people. Specifically, younger people than the outlet's target audience.

Worse, much of the time, the people who act like they do believe free speech is important are doing just that... acting. To them, "free speech" is only for certain people. People who think like they think. People who believe what they believe. People who, way too often, look a lot like they look.

Despite all that, we still believe free speech is pretty important. We believe that free speech is the alternative to the other kind. The kind of speech where you can have as much as you want, as long as you can afford it. And you, dear reader, probably can't afford it. (If you just said, "Hey!" at your screen, please stop for one sec and count up how many dark-money SuperPACs you have.)

Our goal is to provide a platform that ordinary people can afford. One where they can share the content they want to share (within the bounds of the law). One that isn't beholden by the whims of politics. Or, worse, advertisers.

We've been doing that since 2002, and we like to think we're pretty good at it. Technology aside, we know what our legal protections are and how far they go. We know how to tell intimidation from legitimate complaints (which, sadly, do come up from time to time). And, unlike social media, people pay us to host their sites. So we don't have advertisers to placate. Then there's public opinion. Instruments have not yet been devised that operate on the scale necessary to capture the full magnitude of our disinterest in the collective opinions of people whose defining characteristic is their aptitude for holding collective opinions.

We're here to give a voice to those who often struggle to be heard. (But just to be clear, we mean the people who really struggle to be heard. Not the people who go on the largest news network or podcast in the world to cry about being "canceled.")

At one point, the Internet was a place where anyone could carve out a little piece and say, "This is me." The proliferation of social media and its consolidation into a tiny handful of the largest companies in human history hasn't been great for that. And that's before they started training LLMs on your data to make bots to tell you what you want to hear. All so you'll stick around longer and watch some more ads.

We'd like to believe that their time has peaked and that the pendulum is swinging back toward independence. We'd love to have your help to give it a push.

(Don't let this fool you into thinking we don't have very deeply held values of our own. We very much do. And if you use our service to host your hate for some marginalized group or fascist propaganda, well, we'll do our very best to make you regret it. But not by kicking you off. Until you break our rules, at least. Which you probably will. You can't seem to help yourselves.)