How freehug.me works

freehug.me is a small site where people send each other short messages of kindness. Some days you could do with one. Some days you have one to give. Both are ordinary, and the site is built so that neither one marks you out.

This is the whole tour. It takes about four minutes, and there is nothing hidden behind it.

You get a name that is not yours

When you join, the site gives you a pseudonym. You do not choose it and you cannot buy a better one. Nobody sees your email address, and there is no real-name field to leave blank, because there is no real-name field at all.

A profile is optional. Photographs are optional. Saying where you are is optional. People who fill in none of it are not treated as incomplete, and the site never nudges you to add more.

Asking, and giving

You can ask for a hug without giving a reason. There is no box demanding you explain what is wrong, because the moment a site asks for that, the people who most need it decide they are not bad enough to qualify and quietly leave.

You can also give one without qualification. You do not need to have been through anything in particular. You do not need to be having a good day yourself.

A hug here is a few sentences from one person to another. It is not a service, it is not advice, and nobody is on shift.

The two rules are in the database, not in a policy

Two things are true of this site, and they are true because the schema will not permit otherwise:

• You can only hug somebody who asked, or somebody who hugged you first.
• Nobody can message you until you have both said yes.

Together those remove contact from strangers entirely. Not discouraged, not reportable after the fact. There is no code path that delivers it. That is worth its own post, and it has one.

Albums

You can share photographs with specific people, one at a time, and take that back whenever you like. Albums are never public and never indexed by a search engine. Nothing you put in one is visible to somebody you have not chosen.

Meeting

If you want to, you can say you are open to meeting somebody. It works one person at a time and only when you have both said yes. Nobody can see that you said yes until they say yes too, so nothing is risked by being honest about it. There is more in meeting someone new.

What money does and does not buy

Nothing about a hug is ever behind a payment. Asking, giving, receiving and replying are free and will stay free.

Membership buys privacy rather than reach. Seeing who is around and whether your message was read is free and mutual for everybody. What paying adds is the ability to hide while still seeing. That is the right way round: if we sold the seeing, a paying member could watch a free one who could not watch back, and that is surveillance with a price tag on it.

Payments are one-time. Nothing renews on its own, nothing is charged silently, and a longer period is simply a bigger discount for paying up front.

What this is not

This is not a helpline, and nobody here is a professional anything. If today is a serious one, there are people who can help properly and the site says so plainly and links to them. A stranger being kind to you is a real thing and it is not the same thing.

Leaving is easy. You can delete everything, and the site will not ask whether you are sure three times or tell you it will miss you.