A quick note to our queer members

We saw the recent news about Steam and Itch.io being forced to restrict legal adult content by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. As usual, plenty of creators guilty of existing while queer are getting caught in the crossfire.* We’ve also seen a bunch of recent signups from affected folks looking for a safe online place.

This is, to the best of our ability to create and maintain it, that place.

However, we highly value transparently. We’ve had our own issues with that type of pressure in the past. In addition to payment processing, our refusal to prohibit legal adult content makes it incredibly difficult for us to get certain types of insurance. (Like, more than one carrier has literally told us “we can’t write insurance for somebody falling and hurting themselves in your office because you won’t prohibit adult content on your servers.” Oh, fuck off!) We’ve been able to navigate that successfully thus far, but it’s a fine line. Steam and Itch also navigated it successfully, likely with the best of intentions, right up until they didn’t!

We cannot promise that we (and by extension, our members) won’t ever run into similar problems in the future. But we can promise that we will always fight. We can’t promise that we will win. But we can promise that if we fail, we died trying. (And even if we did somehow get forced into banning adult content, adult content != queer content!)

You. Are. Worth. Protecting.

Given this and all the other recent bullshit, we just wanted to make that clear to all of our queer and LGBT+ members… the brand new and the very, very old.

Also, the Fair Access to Banking Act (FABA) is currently in the US Senate and would prohibit banks and payment processors from putting this type of pressure on businesses engaged in legal activity. It was introduced and co-sponsored by 43 Republican Senators big mad about alleged bias against conservative businesses. If you’re in the US, please encourage your elected representatives to support it, if not because it would really help this sort of thing then because irony is an important part of a good, nutritious breakfast.

*I’m not sure that “crossfire” is the right term, given that the fanatics behind pushes like this are absolutely fine with it. Getting rid of adult content isn’t their goal, it’s their starting point.

Terms & Conditions Update: Forced Assistance For Obstinance

Over the years, we have developed several policies that cover the rare situations when one of our members engages in problematic behavior. Rather than trying to maintain an exhaustive list of those situations and different ways of handling them, we have updated our Terms and Conditions of Service to merge those ad-hoc policies into a single new “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” policy.
Continue reading Terms & Conditions Update: Forced Assistance For Obstinance…

Automatic TLS is now a thing

We are rolling out new automatic TLS infrastructure that does not require members to set up or maintain anything. This means that, for new sites, aliases will get TLS automatically within a few minutes after they are set up and working. This works transparently with all site types, including custom processes and proxies. It doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to do anything to set it up, and you don’t have to do anything to renew it.
Continue reading Automatic TLS is now a thing…

Small Christmas upgrades

We’ve got a couple of small updates to announce today:

• One server type to rule them all?
• A forum facelift.

Continue reading Small Christmas upgrades…

Bigger, better, faster, more

I debated whether to write a humorous intro, but I’ve ultimately decided it’s more important to get succinct information out to everyone, so here’s the TLDR:
Over the next few weeks, we will migrate NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to all-new equipment and greatly upgraded network infrastructure.

• We’re replacing our Intel Xeon servers with brand-new AMD Epyc servers.
• All our existing file storage will be migrated from SATA SSDs to NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
• Most of our content will be served from New York City rather than Phoenix after the upgrade.
• Various things may be intermittently weird or slow for the next couple of weeks as we shift them around, but we’re working hard to minimize and avoid disruptions to hosted services.

Continue reading Bigger, better, faster, more…

Hey! What happened to 2023Q2?

You may have noticed that production sites with normal updates are being upgraded from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, and non-production sites are being upgraded from 2023Q1 to 2023Q3. So what happened to 2023Q2?
Continue reading Hey! What happened to 2023Q2?…

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET turns 20 today

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET domain was registered on January 18, 2002. We’re 20 years old today. Wow! So much has changed between then and now. And so much hasn’t.

Looking forward to the next 20!

Free Speech in 2021

So, a bunch of people suddenly discovered they care deeply about free speech immediately after a handful of racists faced even mild consequences for plotting a literal insurrection.

That does not reflect well on those people.

We’ve received quite a few emails (and signups) from them in the past week or so. They appear to believe that “free speech” means they can say whatever they want without repercussions. (It does not.) They expect us to agree with them about that. (We do not.) And they believe they’re entitled to our reassurance and, in some cases, assistance. (They are not.)
Continue reading Free Speech in 2021…

Maintenance for Christmas

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the lowest-usage days of the year (both in terms of member activity and in terms of visits to member sites), so we are going to roll out some core system upgrades over the next 36 hours. These updates relate mostly to file servers.

Despite having no single point of failure from the hardware perspective, each site’s content is still backed by a single system image (necessary for coherency), so these updates may cause some temporary disruptions to affected sites. We will do our best to minimize that.

We do also plan to upgrade our core database servers. These are fully redundant, so we do not anticipate disruption, but the possibility does exist. We hope this upgrade will resolve an issue that mainly manifests as intermittent errors in our member interface early in the morning (UTC) on Sundays.

Act now: The latest effort to censor you (FOSTA) is here!

The US House of Representatives has just passed a bill called FOSTA (the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”). This bill is headed to the senate. It needs to be stopped.

This bill is, as the name implies, ostensibly intended to fight sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is awful, and should be fought. But a lot of sex trafficking experts think that this bill won’t have that effect. That it will actually make things much worse for sex workers. For example, those sex trafficking victims that are supposed to be protected may suddenly find it illegal to talk about their experiences. Whoops.

(Yes, that’s a Jezebel link. If they don’t match your politics, fair enough, try Reason. Pretty much nobody on any side thinks this is a good idea, except a handful of underinformed celebrities. This is not a right-left issue.)

That’s probably reason enough not to pass it, or at least to go back and take another look. But that’s not the end of the story.
Continue reading Act now: The latest effort to censor you (FOSTA) is here!…