If you value your time, and you contribute content to third party websites, it's worth thinking about what might happen to that content down the road. Maybe the site operator will do something you strongly disagree with, threaten to delete your data if you don't install an app, be acquired by a company you don't like, or simply go out of business. More likely, your data will degrade over time. For example, on product or business review sites, if a product is no longer sold or a business closes, it's often impossible to find those reviews later. A site relaunch or database change might lead to some attributes of your data being lost.
freeyourstuff.cc lets you keep your own copy of your data, and also publish it under a free license if you so choose.
Much of the web is like a giant shopping mall, with large commercial sites that either sell stuff or show you ads, tracking your movements along the way. There are a few exceptions -- the best-known is probably Wikipedia, run by a non-profit and supported by donations. Wikipedia's content is written by volunteers and free to use and build upon, thanks to the choice of a free license, the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. This choice of license was itself inspired by the free software movement, which also brought us projects like Linux and the Firefox web browser.
Beyond Wikipedia, millions of people use Creative Commons Licenses for some or all of their work, whether it's photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, independent music, or artworks.
This enables what's been referred to as remix culture: creating new works on top of old ones without worrying about the restrictions of copyright -- while still giving credit to the original author, if desired. Broadly speaking, it also means that creative works can have a life beyond the sites where they were originally published. For instance, huge amounts of Flickr photos under appropriate Creative Commons licenses have been imported by the Wikimedia community and added to Wikipedia articles.
Rather than being locked into any one website, content can be re-used and expanded on in multiple contexts, making the web more diverse and more interesting. With freeyourstuff.cc, we try to keep your content alive by asking lots of folks to run mirrors of content that's been published through the platform -- ensuring that your data really will be around many years from now.
Publishing your content under a free license also means that your content may be re-used in contexts or ways that you don't like. Spammers might slap ads on it, for example. That said, many of those folks don't care too much about what laws they're breaking to begin with.
We believe CC-0 is a good default option, because for a lot of casual contributions, it's unlikely that the author actually wants to enforce any kind of license. Can you really imagine going to court over a Yelp review being reposted somewhere without proper credit? If you can't, then the license just adds friction (a lot of legal complexity, and possible incompatibilities with other licenses) without giving you much of a benefit. For most of us, speech, not copyright law, is the main tool we use to criticize things we don't like, and giving away copyright doesn't mean you're giving away speech.
That said, if mandatory attribution or the copyleft provision of the CC-BY-SA License are important to you, those options are available at the time of publishing. We aren't including additional Creative Commons licenses (like the non-commercial or no-derivatives variants) to remain compatible with the Definition of Free Cultural Works.