What Is the "Mffam" Policy?
93 points by Tomte 13 hours ago | 56 comments
  • neilv 11 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 9 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours 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 10 hours ago |
          > Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal.

          What professions are you thinking of?

          • silisili 3 hours ago |
            'outright illegal' as in criminal may have been a bit strong there, perhaps 'a legal liability' is a better choice.

            Pretty much any profession where one has a duty to their client and has or pretends to have the client's best interest at heart - legal, financial, governmental, medical, etc.

        • pessimizer 9 hours ago |
          > 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.

        • zugi 9 hours ago |
          > 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.

        • xigoi 6 hours ago |
          If you pay someone, they have a right to do whatever they want with the money, which includes donating it to any charity they like.
    • InsideOutSanta 10 hours ago |
      "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 9 hours ago |
        “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.

        • InsideOutSanta 9 hours ago |
          "Not doing something you don’t agree with is not censorship, it’s freedom of expression"

          It's both. It's not government censorship, so it's not a free speech issue in the legal sense. But private entities can still censor things, because that is part of their free speech, as you point out. nearlyfreespeech's free speech allows them to either allow or censor other entities' free speech on their platform.

          As a matter of principle, nearlyfreespeech does not want to censor other entities' free speech. They explain why here: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#TheLongGame

        • xigoi 6 hours ago |
          NearlyFreeSpeech is a hosting service, not a publisher. They do not (necessarily) endorse the content on the sites they host.
    • surgical_fire 10 hours ago |
      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 9 hours ago |
      > 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.

    • ollybee 9 hours ago |
      It's not mutually exclusive. I work for a web host and there's no way we'd host the kind of stuff NFS host, but dont think that makes me in any way against free speech.
  • tzury 9 hours ago |
    Did you all noticed the hash?

       https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#BecauseFuckNazisThatsWhy
    
    They got a great sense of humor.
  • finiche 9 hours ago |
    Haloy
  • Mistletoe 9 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours ago |
        And it gets a lot greyer than that.
    • xigoi 6 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 8 hours 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.

    • makizar 9 hours 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.
      • lanternfish 8 hours ago |
        They hope to offset some sort of imperative burden (presumably moral) of hosting onerous content by countermanding the effect of hosting that content with paired monetary support of its adversary. My consideration is that pairing effect there is extremely weak - maybe so weak that the policy is on net dubios.
    • speerer 8 hours ago |
      I think a major part of this policy is that the hosting site does not want to (and does not want to be seen to) _profit_ from what they consider to be repugnant customers. It's not a bigotry offset policy: It's a self-modulation to preserve the integrity of their principles all the way to the end.
      • lanternfish 8 hours ago |
        Oh shit I totally misread the policy - I interpreted "payments to such accounts" to mean donations etc. made through channels that the host supported. As written, it's not really an offset, and really just a way to wash hands, which honestly I probably support more.
        • speerer 7 hours ago |
          That's funny, I made the same mistake on my first reading. I had to slow down and go back over it!
    • dejj 7 hours ago |
      Thank you. I used to fancy MFFAM for it’s seeming cleverness. But tobacco taxing basically does the same. And you could literally pave a road with its residue of good intentions. We’d all be hosting CSAM and pour the revenue into government programmes, but we don’t, because we know it to be more effective to prevent damage than trying to fix it afterwards.
    • GuB-42 5 hours ago |
      Even if it doesn't do much from an economy perspective, the simple idea that the offending websites are paying for a cause they are against may have an effect.

      Imagine you have a website about Vim and you realize you are paying for the promotion of Emacs.

    • baobun 5 hours ago |
      Where's the fallacy? They set no expectations on fully offsetting. It's a compromise.
  • ginko 8 hours 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 6 hours 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