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Hexbear Proposals chapo.chat matrix room.
This will be a place for site proposals and discussion before implementation on the site.
Every proposal will also be mirrored into a pinned post on the hexbear community.
Any other ideas for helping to integrate the two spaces are welcome to be commented here or messaged to me directly.
Within Hexbear Proposals you can see the history of all site proposals and react to them, indicating a vote for or against a proposal.
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All top level messages within the channel must be a Proposals (idea for changing the site), Feedback (regarding non-technical aspects of the site, for technical please use https://hexbear.net/c/feedback), or Appeals (regarding admin/moderator actions).
Discussion regarding these will be within nested threads under the post.
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Trying to determine who is scamming would also mean defining what constitutes a scam or not. Which for certain obvious definitions like okay sure but trying to draw a distinction where it's less clear is just means testing. Trying to clearly define a line of who is allowed to ask for help and who isn't is neoliberalism of the highest order
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.
Basically all of this yes
Personally, I look at post histories and whether or not they engage in the community at large or if it's all just mutual aid posts. I know that's not necessarily fair maybe but it's how I feel. The mutual aspect implies they do what they can to help others or engage in the community with meaningful posts and discussions.
It's not a pass/fail thing, it just feels like a window into the type of person asking for help and what they are likely to spend the money on.
Maybe there's a solution in this observation? Maybe two comms could be used, one focusing on mutual aid and the other on charity donations, with the mutual aid emphasising the mutual aspect and the charity one emphasising donations.
Though something like that could just end up with both comms completely dead, or just one very quickly (it's much easier to ask for mutual aid rather than charity) and it wouldn't solve anything.
In theory that makes sense, but in reality I think it would just be the same thing spread out. I agree with other users that mutual aid should be more for acute problems instead of a rolling fundraiser to pay people's rents and stuff. Like another user said, who couldn't use a spare $100 for bills every month? I just don't think that's the spirit of mutual aid. We should be aiming to solve problems. The "no rules" way it is currently being handled feels a little more enabling than helpful. Maybe I'm wrong
Yeah, I thought it was an area worth discussing, but it isn't really. I kind of torpedoed my own thoughts on the idea in that comment.
I focused much more on this in my main comment on the matter. I think setting things up to emphasise non-monetary aid and helping people get out of rough situations is better than just financial help alone. Though a bunch of random strangers on the internet might not be all that helpful for that unfortunately. I think a lot of people are worried about stepping on toes and giving unsolicited advice, because tbh, that happens all the time with people in crisis, and it's incredibly aggravating. Having a system in place if people want to use it, but it not being mandatory would be best I think.
I can see that point
However, I think we have a good community here and we should be aiming higher and trying to build something. Getting complacent during a slow collapse of the world order is just going to catch a lot of people here off guard and we will be fighting from an entrenched situation. I don't know how to "enforce" bettering things here and I know different people get different things out of being here, but the loose attitude here is a blessing and a curse. It's a great haven against the regular world, but "they" are coming for us. We should be doing more things through a theory based worldview and trying to build toward that future we all talk about. Unfortunately that requires some personal responsibility on everyone's part to not just be idle.
When I was a teen, I wanted to run away to a commune really bad. In my head, it was just smoking weed listening to Bob Dylan and playing naked volleyball or whatever. It's a lot more like being a farmer. It's going to be hard work. There's wells to ditch, food to grow, animals to take care of, things need fixing, there's cooking on a large scale.. After some research, I realized most communes were run by "doers" and populated by people who either did all the work while others fucked off or the "leaders" exploited everyone else. What I'm getting at is we share similarities with the hippie commune phenomena where a handful of people run this site and get to call the shots, and some who are here for leisure. It creates an uneven space where not much gets done.
There's a real identity problem with the site as a whole. Are we just a place to shit post about something you saw on Twitter or are we trying to educate and be involved? A mix of both is fine, but I feel like it's a rudderless ship as it stands.