After discussing this with the people most often using the mutual aid community and feedback here we will be making a single change.

Meta posts will no longer be permitted in !mutual_aid@hexbear.net critical meta posts must not be about specific users and posted in !feedback@hexbear.net at risk of removal.

We will change the mutual aid sidebar to remove the clause permitting meta posts, we will also ask that users post once a day so that everyone’s post’s can be seen but this is not a hard rule as it is pretty clear that removing posts is a last resort in that community. This joins the other community recommendations that users include currency, how much is needed, updating when a user has received funds, or updating/locking the post when the need has been met.

This will be unfeatured in about 12 hours

~~Hello users of hexbear:

Due to recent meta posts in our mutual aid community we wanted to open up discussion about the community !mutual_aid@hexbear.net

We will never require explanation or justification from a user asking for aid in the community, and the mod and admin team continue to commit to not featuring an individual’s mutual aid request to prevent unfair exposure.

In addition, we will maintain a strict “No critical comments or meta comments” on a mutual aid post.

This post is to discuss the mutual aid community’s rule of allowing meta posts: mutual aid as a community, those making posts in it and those commenting on posts.

We are considering removing the exception allowing meta posts but wanted to involve the userbase before committing to a change.

Please comment with any thoughts, feelings, or suggestions regarding this change.

Thank you~~

  • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    30·
    11 days ago

    Everyone trying to help out should set their own personal limits. For example, I spend my allotment of donation money on our trans homeless housing projects so I can’t give much money here. I am able to help people get housing directly from here, and I have done that a couple of times, so I do try to keep an eye on things.

    And yeah, means testing as a policy is terrible. Imagine needing help, dealing with the stress of needing to take donations, and just getting shunted to an off-channel because you weren’t deemed worthy. So many charity operations work on this premise, I’ve experienced it myself when I was younger and needed help. Setting your own limits makes it your problem, not an organizational problem, and not a problem for the person asking for help. I also doubt the usefulness of means testing in a charity, I think scammers can be very conniving and all you’re doing is hurting normal people by becoming too restrictive.

    Scammers of course try to ruin it for everyone. In my real world experience dealing with charities and homeless issues, we’ve even seen certain people violently silence others that need help in order to cut in front of lines by flashing guns or knives. These are all issues relating to the scarcity of help, unfortunately, and they cannot be realistically solved in the current system.

    Housing centric aid imo is the most important and direct form of aid, in my time helping people out irl, I’ve seen so much money go straight to a landlord’s pocket when many of the donors had extra rooms to directly house someone and for much cheaper. Some of these donors have literally never had it cross their mind that they should help house homeless people directly, such is the state of mutual aid related education in this country. Scammers are also few and far between, scammers are selfish and are very unlikely to accept housing in a group-living situation, so it is a self-filtering process. Landlords are genuinely the most evil people in society, imagine encouraging someone with cancer to do a gofundme so they can directly pay you cash at a price that isn’t even the base cost of operation for the apartment! I have seen this happen, and people applauded the landlord for not kicking the person with cancer out!

    At this point I’m just rambling and going off topic, I’ve been wanting to do a writeup about housing aid networks for a long time but I’ve been very busy lately.