What Is the "Mffam" Policy?
28 comments
·January 11, 2025jibcage
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
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.
neilv
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
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
(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
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.
InsideOutSanta
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.
tzury
Did you all noticed the hash?
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisThatsWhy
Mistletoe
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.
finiche
Haloy
Innocuous42
Doesn't it defeat the purpose to fund organizations that are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC, when you are claiming to defend free speech? It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to content they don't like as is also rather apparent in the link (https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisT...).
Why even bother to piss off users you don't like? For pretending rights?
> [...] a fair number of people who run them only believe in free speech when they're the ones talking.
Which includes the people who run this site.
Disclaimer: I have never used this service, maybe it is just a weak moment.
InsideOutSanta
"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 :-)
throw310822
Ironic since the ADL is a staunch defender of Israel, a country whose leader is wanted for crimes against humanity.
echelon
> Doesn't it defeat the purpose to fund organizations that are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC, when you are claiming to defend free speech?
They're absolving themselves of the ethical "bad feels" of hosting content they disagree with.
If you host a Nazi website full of antisemitism, they'll donate to the ADL as a counter.
If you host a white supremacist website, they'll donate to the SPLC.
They're thinking of this as a form of equivalent exchange. If you put bad energy into the universe, they'll take your money and pay the groups that oppose you as a form of balance.
The reason they host these horrible websites is that they believe free speech is more of a moral high ground than turning these customers away.
> Why even bother to piss off users you don't like? For pretending rights?
Free speech is vital. You should defend the speech of people you find abhorrent (racists, Nazis, atheists, gays, whatever), because if the political pendulum swings and the machinery, will, or precedent to censor is present, you'll be the one silenced.
Before the internet, conservatives frequently censored topics they disliked. Atheism, LGBT content, porn, certain political discourse -- pretty much anything that the religiously pious people of the 80's and 90's would detest -- were censored from the airwaves, found unsuitable to publish, and pushed out of the zeitgeist.
From around 2014 to 2024 it was the exact opposite. Questioning liberal policies you got caught by social media dragnets - content was deboosted or removed, people were banned. Questioning the origins of Covid, talking about DEI policies, etc.
And now the pendulum is swinging back again. We're in for more of the same from the other side.
We should stop building tools for censorship and instead enable individuals to control the content they consume. We should be able to individually (or as a group) opt into blocking certain people and content. We should be able to tweak our algorithms. But we should always be immune to having our speech immediately deleted from the internet for going against whatever the current power may be.
Freedom of speech for thee means freedom of speech for me.
And freedom of speech does not mean -- and has never meant -- freedom from consequences. The minute you open your mouth your peers will judge you.
silisili
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.
InsideOutSanta
"But don't pretend to be free speech defenders"
This is 100% consistent with being a free speech defender. Free speech defenders' position is that speech you don't like should not be fought by censorship, but should instead be fought by speech you do like, which is what what they're funding.
"It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around"
We don't know how the finances work out, for all we know, they take a loss on these accounts when their full effort to handle payment to charities is taken into account.
ahoka
“Free speech defenders' position is that speech you don't like should not be fought by censorship, but should instead be fought by speech you do like, which is what what they're funding.”
This is where they are wrong. Not doing something you don’t agree with is not censorship, it’s freedom of expression. Publishing things, even when saying they don’t support them is supporting those opinions with extra steps.
Thorrez
>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
> 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
"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.
zugi
> Little do you know, they are taking your money and donating to those pineapple on pizza places.
I love your analogy, even though I disagree with your conclusions. They publish their MMFAM policy right on their website, so you have fair warning that they may be donating a portion of your payment to those pineapple on pizza places, or other places whose views you disagree with.
I'm not saying it's a perfect policy that every company should mimic, but I think many companies may find this model preferable to applying active viewpoint discrimination to the content they host.
luckylion
> Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal.
What professions are you thinking of?
pessimizer
> The policy is not so innocent.
I'm for free speech, but please don't say stuff like this, in any context. Nobody said the policy was "innocent," whatever you mean by that. The policy is a device that they use in order to make themselves feel better about facilitating the speech of people they dislike. The policy is not intended to create "innocence."
> they are taking your money
No, they're taking their money.
> Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal.
Which? I can't imagine one.
null
surgical_fire
They are effectively not pretending. They defend free speech by hosting shit that they explicitly do not like.
Then they use their own freedom to support speech that counters the shit they find offensive.
motorest
> Sounds kinda terrible to me. If you don't want to host content, don't. I fully support that decision.
To me, it sounded an awful lot like they really want to be paid to host content but are also desperately trying to avoid the negative backlash of hosting it.
To make matters worse, they openly call their paying customers morons.
It would be very hard to take a stance that's worse than this, to be honest.
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.