The Internet's Biggest Collection of Free Stuff, and How You Can Help Maintain It
You've probably bookmarked a dozen "useful links" pages over the years, only to watch them rot into a graveyard of dead URLs. Keeping a good resource list alive is harder than it looks. FMHY (FreeMediaHeckYeah) is an attempt to solve that at scale, and it's maintained entirely on GitHub.
What It Does
FMHY is a wiki that bills itself as the largest collection of free stuff on the internet. That's a broad claim, but the structure behind it is straightforward: a community-curated index of links, organized into sections and kept current by contributors. The main site lives at fmhy.net, with news and monthly updates posted separately at fmhy.net/posts.
The project is distributed across a few surfaces. There's the website itself, a set of backups, and a JSON API. The backups, markdown, and JSON API are all documented on the GitHub wiki. One thing worth noting upfront: neither the site nor the GitHub repo hosts any files. It's an index, not a repository of content.
The README also lays out an emoji legend for navigating the wiki. A globe marks third-party indexes, an arrow marks section links, and a star flags community recommendations. Small detail, but it tells you the wiki is organized with a fair amount of internal navigation logic rather than being a flat list of links.
Why It's Cool
The interesting thing here isn't the content itself (you can judge that on your own), it's the maintenance model. Most link collections die because one person gets tired of fixing broken URLs. FMHY treats the whole thing like an open-source software project.
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Anyone can contribute. The README explicitly invites suggestions and corrections from anyone, with a contribution guide to read before you add or remove anything. There's no gatekeeping beyond that process.
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There's a search step built into the workflow. Before adding a new site, contributors are asked to search the single-page markdown or the API version to make sure it's not already listed. That's a small instruction, but it's the kind of thing that keeps a large index from bloating with duplicates.
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Approved changes propagate everywhere. Once a change is approved, it gets applied to the live site and all the locked backups. You're not maintaining three separate copies of the same list by hand.
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Multiple output formats. The wiki is available as a website, as markdown, and through a JSON API. If you want to build something on top of it (a search tool, a CLI, whatever), you don't have to scrape HTML.
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Site hunting is a community activity. There's a Reddit thread dedicated to finding new sites to add, which turns link discovery into something a group can do rather than a solo chore.
The emoji legend is also a nice touch in a low-key way. It gives the wiki a consistent visual vocabulary, so you can scan for community favorites or jump between related sections without reading every line.
How to Try It
Using FMHY is about as simple as it gets. There's nothing to install.
- Head to fmhy.net to browse the wiki.
- Check fmhy.net/posts for news and monthly updates if you want to see what's changed recently.
- If you want the raw data, grab the markdown or JSON API from the backups page on the GitHub wiki.
If you want to contribute, the process is documented but not complicated:
- Read the contribution guide first.
- Before adding a new site, search the single-page markdown or the API version with Ctrl + F to check it's not already there.
- Submit your suggestion. Approved changes get applied to the site and all backups.
- You can also send things directly through the Discord.
- If you're looking for new sites to add, there's a list of links in the site hunting thread on Reddit.
The repo itself is at github.com/fmhy/edit.
Final Thoughts
FMHY is a link index, and it's honest about that. It doesn't host files, it doesn't pretend to be a platform, and it doesn't overcomplicate what is essentially a very large, very well-maintained list. The value is in the maintenance model: distributed contributions, a defined review process, and multiple output formats that make the data reusable.
If you've ever run a link list that slowly decayed, this is a decent template for how to keep one alive. And if you just want to find free stuff, the wiki is right there. Either way, the contribution path is open, which is the whole point.