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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.
Sending messages will be restricted to verified and active hexbear accounts older than 1 month with their matrix id in their hexbear user profile.
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.
To gain matrix verification, all you need to do is navigate to my hexbear userprofile and click the send a secure private message including your hexbear username.
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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