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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

Hosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads, neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for everyone?

You would then have a financially stable organization backing the pages, have democratic input into the hosting process, and probably less censorship than a private company would apply for those that care about that sort of thing (since private companies need literally no reason to do so whereas a public enterprise would need a court order or some such).

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I host my (static site, very-low-traffic) blog with nearlyfreespeech.net for less than $10/yr. My hosting costs are less than domain-registration costs.

Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.

Thanks for the tip.

And if you use Cloudflare in front of NFSN, the costs would be even lower.

I host on github for nothing.

Static hosting via AWS S3 (or Azure/GCP equivalent) with a free Cloudflare account in front it might be even cheaper!

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti...

> why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website

It's debatable whether this is the sort of thing governments exist to do.

That's not an argument that it won't work fwiw.

It is debatable, and I think it's really worth considering the argument for it.

Out of all the indirect ways of paying for something, getting it funded by the government is probably the least user-hostile solution possible - it could be set up as just another public service, with zero incentive to milk people in some nonobvious way.

Because it wouldn't be a free service. It would be funded by your money. How mad are you going to get when your money goes to host those views you find repellent?

When the inevitable happens and the content needs to be monitored (can't have government funds used to host things like doxing blog posts, for example), then how much will you pay?

Governments don't hand out free stuff. They take your stuff to pay for it.

Right, of course it's not free, but it would be cheap to provide and a universal good for all US residents. I also don't really mind the taxes they can come from the rich anyway.

So long as the views expressed don't cross the line into violence or ethnic cleansing, I'm in favor of the first amendment. Yes, some manual curation will be necessary, but it's irrelevant to me if society as a whole pays for it or a company. It seems to me a free service for everyone is a better deal that has knock on benefits for public debate.

No. It probably won’t have knock on benefits for public debate. The government already has channels for expressing your views to them, and society has always shouldered the distribution cost of their own views.

Making hosting free is unlikely to benefit anyone and more likely to actually hurt the First Amendment. Just like we have a division of Church and State, we are better off having a division between Blog and State.

I totally agree. The internet is where people live now and there is no "commons", no "public square". This is where people get so irritated with private companies that own all the space and decide how we interact. The internet is a libertarian dystopia. Things like "free speech" would apply on public social media platforms. If this idea were ever to come to fruition it would probably need to start at the local scale and focus on local political issues.

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