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 [email protected] critical meta posts must not be about specific users and posted in [email protected] 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 [email protected]
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~~
You could argue that what this community is usually doing isn’t actually mutual aid. Mutual aid in most socialist theory says that help should never be a one way street, you should help e.g. house a homeless person but the homeless person should also help the organization keep afloat by helping cut costs or operate in whatever way is within their means. Our loose housing group obviously practices mutual aid, for example, some of the homeless people help cook homemade meals for the houses they’re in to help reduce food costs or they help maintain a garden.
I personally think that a homeless person having direct access to donors is better than a traditional charity. In some cases, this does not make sense (e.g. someone needs a very secure way of receiving funds due to threats to their life, many refugee organizations fall into this category and require security people on the payroll to safely help people). Charities are often middlemen that means test applicants for aid and pay out their board members with hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash, in many cases its a racket that uses donations to fund propaganda about how good these sorts of organizations are. Imagine if those hundreds of thousands of dollars were going to people that desperately needed it.