Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

I first heard this described in the most unusual of places: a movie.

In 24 Hour Party People, Steve Coogan portrays Tony Wilson who co-founded Factory Records and would later sign bands like The Durutti Column, Joy Division (later to become New Order after Ian Curtis’ death in May 1980) and Happy Mondays.

As the legend goes, there was no contract between many of the early Factory bands and the label, to the point where a “contract” was written in Wilson’s own blood.

“The musicians own everything, the company owns nothing. All our bands have the freedom to fuck off.”

As the 24 Hour Party People book, written by Wilson says: “Written in blood, The Factory non-contract set out the manifesto for one of the most influential and progressive record labels of our time.”

I love everything about this.

I want people on the web to have this freedom. I want this freedom for myself and for ordinary internet users everywhere.

What does the freedom to fuck off look like?

For a typical web user, I’d say the freedom to fuck off looks like this:

If you have a choice of domain name registrar, a choice of DNS provider, a choice of email provider and a choice of web host, you should have the freedom to fuck off. It’s not quite that simple, so you need to be able to do a little more than that.

Domain name registrar

Can I take my domain name to another registrar without a huge penalty?

DNS provider

Can I export my DNS zone and import it elsewhere?

Email provider

Can I export my email and import it elsewhere without changing my email address?

Web host

Can I take my website and host it elsewhere without it breaking?

Of course, there are companies that will do it all! They’ll host your DNS, your email, your website… they’ll even give you a free domain name for the first year of service.

I’d say do not use a single company for anything like this. You always want that freedom to fuck off at any moment.

I use Porkbun for most of my domain name registrations. I use them because they have a good price and transferring in and out of them is easy. I’ve done several moves to Porkbun after Gandi raised their prices significantly. I’ve transferred a couple of domain names away from Porkbun too.

I use Cloudflare for DNS these days. In my previous job we used Cloudflare extensively and it was easy for me to move my personal stuff there. I think there are perfectly valid reasons to not use Cloudflare for lots of things but I think DNS is very low on that list. Cloudflare’s proxy services are something many people are critical of and they certainly have some things I would like to see them do differently.

My email set up is complicated, but I use hey.com for my main email service these days. I like it, it is certainly different to many conventional services, and it’s also not cheap. I also use Fastmail for a few other things which is certainly a more conventional email service.

Finally, I use Bytemark for the majority of my web hosting. Bytemark hosts Libre.fm and as such I have my small personal sites on another server but equally donated as part of the same account.

I’d argue that certificates used to be part of this as well but nowadays even some of the more legacy-era web hosts are offering Let’s Encrypt certificates instead of trying to get you to rent one from a small number of companies.

I accept that that many people will use whatever DNS offering their domain name registrar provides. They’ll use Gmail for their email service and maybe they’ll host a website with Squarespace or one of the other similar services advertised on podcasts. It’s still possible to fuck off from these services, but it takes a little more work. At the very least, being able to send an email from yourname@example.com is better than all your email being sent from yourname@gmail.com.

Recently we saw the closure of Glitch’s project hosting and many people are looking for alternatives. Jenn Schiffer has a few recommendations.

I’d like to start thinking more about this for both myself and my users. What does it look like to have the freedom to fuck off from Libre.fm? Especially as we enter into Libre.fm’s second act (also a reference to 24 Hour Party People) – I don’t have all the answers today, but I am very interested in making Libre.fm something you have 100% freedom to fuck off from.