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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1299 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 10, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Are there memes already - Africa if Mercator projection was not used - a view of vast futuristic landscape? This one just begs for it.

I haven't seen any, so I made one just for you.

That's some good art, AI? If so, what kind of prompt did you use?

The base image is a common meme. (I manually darkened the skin of the human a little, since this particular instance is supposed to represent Africa.) For the text, I just used Arial Black in white with a black outline.

Unrelated, but I really enjoy that you maintain a personal site and use it liberally. I'm considering starting one of my own. Would you speak highly of NearlyFreeSpeech.net as a network host?

Personally I decided to host my personal projects, which are across a few different domain names, on a Hetzner server. I'm paying about 5 euros per month for it and I like the freedom I have to run whatever I want on it. I can't link the sites without doxxing myself though

I've run clockworkthought.com/blog and a number of other personal or project websites on NFS. They're the most trustworthy provider I can find from an ethos-of-free-speech perspective, but that's damning with faint praise, and I wouldn't put money on it, nevermind data.

(I also trust them to stay around longer than I trust Google Sites, which is the closest 'free' option. Google Sites is a lot more useful friendly for very simple document-style websites, though.)

The big selling point is that, for tiny websites or at low volume, they're dirt-cheap. For really optimized websites, you can end up paying less for hosting than you would for your domain name, but even at standard rates, sub-30 USD / year is pretty much the default.

The downside is that it's cheap, rather than inexpensive. You're not getting first-in-class performance, or user interfaces, or support staff. Even the built-in outbound email functionality is pretty limited. If you need a lot of storage (>10GB), plan on doing anything latency-sensitive, or need a lot of database functionality, they're not a great choice. There is a built-in control panel, and you can just use SFTP or SCP to upload files, but don't expect any WYSIWYG editor. Costs are based primarily on site storage count and don't have a real throttling capability, so if you allow user uploads, this could potentially be moderately expensive.

There aren't problems for my use case: I went with Grav as a content management system knowing that its design would be less responsive than NFS's hardware, and having to boot up a SCP client is second nature from my day job. Whether they'd be an issue for you is a bigger and probably harder question.

I do not have the technical knowledge that would qualify me to answer that question.

Denizens of this website who are more knowledgeable than I am have pointed out that NearlyFreeSpeech.net's increasingly-authleft political views have started to throw the validity of its name into some doubt (1 2 3), but they have not leveled any technical criticisms at it.

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