FreeFollow FAQ
Who is this for?
Individuals: Share updates from your life with family and friends, privately, with a better experience than group texts.
Authors: Publish your content on a simple, powerful platform with zero ads and no pressure on your readers to create an account.
Governments: Keep your constituents informed without asking them to use objectionable platforms.
Social groups: Host discussions among people sharing your interests, privately or publicly.
Who can use FreeFollow?
Everyone can read content in public channels without signing up, like Wikipedia.
Free users can read and participate in public or private channels, forever, without paying a dime.
Paying users can host public or private channels.
When can I start using this?
FreeFollow is currently in private beta. When we enter public beta, users will be activated from the waitlist in the order in which they signed up.
Why must new followers be explicitly admitted to private channels if they've already accepted an invitation? This is so annoying!
This is due to how the end-to-end encryption works.
Every channel's content is encrypted with a key that is unique to the channel. And to guarantee your privacy, FreeFollow can never see this key. (This is what "end-to-end encryption" means.)
Therefore, followers must somehow be given the channel key without ever revealing the key to FreeFollow.
This implies a channel owner must encrypt the channel key specifically for the new follower.
This requires the new follower to first request to follow the channel so the channel owner can then encrypt the channel key just for them, and give it to them. This is what the "Admit John Doe" button does. When you click the button, the app running in your browser uses the new follower's public key to encrypt ("wrap") the channel key for them, then sends that encrypted key to FreeFollow to be given to them. They can decrypt this key when they login, but FreeFollow cannot decrypt it. And because FreeFollow never sees the channel key, there is simply no way for us to grant it to new followers — you have to be logged in and do it yourself.
As a bonus, this workflow also provides a checkpoint for you to explicitly approve everyone who wants to access your channel. So someone who illicitly acquires the secret invitation link can't just immediately follow your channel and see all your content; you would have to let them in first.
What’s the pricing model?
FreeFollow is just a special form of web hosting: people and organizations pay to host channels. So if you're not hosting a channel, you don't have to pay. A user who only reads content and writes replies to other peoples' posts? Never has to pay. A user who only posts to channels that others are hosting? Never has to pay. To drive this home: FreeFollow is not "pay-to-post"; it's pay-to-host.
Some examples may help make this clear:
John, a paying user, creates a private channel to share photos and videos of his daughter, and invites his wife to the channel as an author who can create posts. They then each invite their families and close friends to the channel as followers who can read and comment on posts. Only John and Erin are able to post to the channel; only their invited friends and family can see and comment on posts; and only John’s account is charged for hosting the channel. It's totally free for everyone else.
John creates a private group for his neighborhood association and invites about 50 of his neighbors, for whom participation is free. He adds his neighbors Jeff and Mark as co-owners of the group. Since John is already a paying user and has plenty of storage in his tier, there’s no additional expense for him. Later, Jeff creates an organization account for the neighborhood association, which then takes over hosting the group from John.
Dan creates a public channel for his Cajun Cuisine food truck and posts his menu and location every day. Everyone on the web can read it for free.
Who can view my private content?
Only people you explicitly invite to a private channel. You can revoke their access at any time.
How much does it cost?
We're aiming for $5/mo for 10GB of storage.
What counts against my storage?
Any content posted to channels you're hosting.
Is my data trapped forever inside this platform?
No, you can download an archive of your data at any time.
How good is your security design?
You can learn more about this in Privacy.