porkbun is the one yeah. There are other options but they all kinda suck and so far I haven’t seen anything bad with porkbun

don’t use the big 3 cloud providers (aws, google, azure), they’re ridiculously overpriced for what you need.

There are ways you could do it from your home internet connection, but it makes it slightly more complex especially if you want to be at all anonymous. Cloudflare, if you’re cool with using them, does offer this capability I believe. But of course you’ll be limited by the quality of your internet connection, stability of your power, and keeping your computer on at all times. But there’s advantages too (you could have full disk encryption, cost is lower, you’ll likely have a more powerful PC at home than the server you would rent, etc)

I actually agree about just about all of that but if you have knowledge that a request is illegitimate why should the site ban you from sharing that info? that just feels wrong. its not like there’s a huge history of constant fights over metaposting and stuff (they are rarely actually made, 1 this month), and anything over the line gets removed by mods. I can see how it could turn into a slapfight I guess, but it’s been allowed for the past however many months or more and it hasn’t been much of an issue in my view.

I just think there’s monetary incentive not to engage with the comm in the way you’ve laid out, and people are (understandably, they’re struggling) mostly not going to do it unless it is an enforced rule or nets them more donos.

Whether or not such a rule actually would do more good than harm, I don’t know.

I just don’t think, especially with money at stake, that it’s reasonable to hope that every single user who ever uses the comm will do so in good faith, or be obvious enough in their bad faith to be sussed out. And even one person with an axe to grind could potentially get someone banned with fabricated evidence. I think we have to build systems that are resilient to abuse where possible and the strong possibility of disciplining a user in need of help feels worse to me than allowing someone to collect donos and not update the post to reflect them. I guess you could say that any mod action being taken requires multiple reports from established accounts showing a pattern of behavior, not just one and done. That would help.

but frankly sending screenshots back and forth offsite also overcomplicates the process of both donating and receiving donations. It just doesn’t feel like a well fleshed out plan to me

I definitely get the instinct here, but the status quo is that metaposting is allowed (just not direct reply comments) and I count two metaposts in the past month. The one that incited this post, and one of someone thanking the donor who came through for them, weeks ago.

I don’t think that’s an unmanageable level of metaposting or being done in bad faith. If they were proposing opening up more metaposting I’d agree with you but the question being posed is keep the status quo or shutting off all avenues for feedback or calling out anything, because the mods don’t want to be the ones to handle concerns for ethical reasons. So that kind of nixes handling it privately.

I appreciate that reactive comments just harassing people asking for help are deleted and agree we need to clamp down on those as strongly as possible, but I don’t see that problem happening with posts, historically

the inciting incident for this post was a meta-post recently but the history goes back years. its messy.

we would establish matrix communication for the sending of proof

I hate to say it but fabricating screenshots is so easy that I struggle to believe such a system could work if used in bad faith by even one person

my reading comprehension might just be bad on this tbf. I read it 3x before realizing the second half of that first quoted line I posted was opening up the floor to a broader discussion.

anyhow, I think slap-dash tracking of donos could easily end up worse than doing nothing. we don’t want to deanonymize people more than necessary, we don’t want the system to be exploitable for harassment of specific users or be hard to navigate.

similarly leaving no avenue for complaints seems bad. The (very uncommon, less than once a month) meta-posts attract so much attention because there are some genuine scams going on, not just because they’re bringing out reactionary sentiments (though there always seem to be at least one or two comments that go too far). And unless mods are going to police what is and isn’t a scam, social pressure and metaposts are the only outlet this stuff has. It’s a very thorny thing to balance but I’m glad we’re trying to improve it

There is often an element of learned helplessness at play as well, and I don’t totally disagree that it matters that people are truthful about what the money goes to for trust reasons, but ultimately being poor is just expensive. how are you supposed to cook things like lentils and beans and veggies when you live in a tent or a car and are forced to move around constantly. just keeping food around can attract pests, you don’t have space to store much in the way of cooking equipment let alone fresh produce, you don’t have reliable access to grocery stores, etc. and ultimately why would you bother trying to live a basic lifestyle when the dopamine-hit slop is right there, hot and ready, and the grocery store (especially one with non-moldy produce) is miles away and swarming with security, cops, karens, etc who all don’t want you there.

Every little aspect from buying food, food storage, food preparation, cooking, sanitation all have associated costs, risks, challenges, etc where getting $5 and getting enough calories worth of addictive taco bell food is very simple and has few externalities to deal with.

If you’re worried about “being ripped off” you might want to rethink what you’re doing looking at the mutual aid com.

I think this holds up when its people asking for $20 here and there. Anyone e-panhandling for $20 clearly needs the money far more than I do, same as people on the street. But when its hundreds or thousands for specific needs, I think it does matter that those needs are genuine because that amount of money could have fed dozens of others rather than potentially going to someone who isn’t being truthful. I don’t think that’s generally the case, I think the vast majority of our posters have been genuine, but to say nobody should care at all if they’re being lied to is hard for me to stomach

Hey I’m glad to see this situation getting attention but starting out the discussion post with

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.

and then turning around and saying “okay here’s a list of sweeping changes based on feedback” feels like a major shift. I didn’t post any generic suggestions about what to do with the comm because I thought the post was intended to be specifically about one rule changing

anyhow, of that list:

• No
• Yes.
• Lean no. Depends on how its implemented.
• Don’t care
• Yes

yeah I just don’t see going offline as a total solution at all (I assume you don’t either)

I mean yes it’s a good thing to do but you still exist in the built environment with all the things I mentioned and more all surveilling you, and you don’t even get to reap the benefits of modern communications. I think you need community buy in on some level to deal with some of these. mass shaming and defacing of cameras would go a long way. We are at a point where not having a phone or taking even mild precautions makes people think you’re a drug dealer. That level of penetration of society means cops can just look for anyone they can’t track rather than find a needle in a haystack. or at least I fear we’re there.

my concern is more of privacy than volume, but its true that it could easily be wasted effort

I’ve wondered this as well, often out loud in posts/comments. The urge to call our charity mutual aid just to make it “leftist” is a bad one, IMO. But there are some minor differences at least in theory. The idea is that it’s a “pay it forward” kind of thing where we help eachother out when needed and then those people help others when they are able. But because of the realities of capitalist life I don’t see that happening all that often. The people with the stability to send money regularly to randos from the internet tend to stay the same and the people with serious needs tend to stay the same. I think the only real difference in practice is that much of our donations goes to known community members, not random strangers. Does that make it mutual aid? idk, not really probably, but I appreciate it whatever we call it.

I think about this in on the ground work as well. Many many orgs call their work mutual aid when its really just charity. But it feels very hard to ask anything of people who are destitute, even if involving them in the work sustaining them could be liberatory

could be automated with a bot. better than having individual mods in the loop IMO

Yeah I don’t think there’s a reason for an aboveground political org to put a target on its back to explicitly support this guy but you’re 100% correct. Anecdotally I’ve also heard of infiltration, in both anarchist direct action groups and more tame socialist groups. And with DSA in particular I constantly see people behaving like wreckers, though it’s hard to distinguish kids getting into petty drama and taking it too far from fed wreckers sometimes.

Opsec concerns… it’s going to be hard. Every other door has a goddamn ring camera on it. Almost everyone carries a smartphone everywhere. Traffic lights all have cameras. And you can’t erase the past, if you’re already on a list from being related to DSA or food not bombs or doing local mutual aid, are you just inviting further scrutiny on your org by being involved? I guess the idea is to blend in. But it’s hard to not end up on the radar of local cops if you’re doing anything remotely cool, and already being on their radar seems like a mighty fine way to get popped when doing any more serious actions. We need mass mobilization I guess, it can’t just be the same old activists doing everything.

I will say though, it’s at a point where its probably more important to do something than to not get caught (though both is ofc the goal)

Fair enough!

I wish that literacy and comprehension/attention spans were the biggest hurdle organizing here faced… buncha fuckin treatler settlers

To smoke a joint then eat an entire box of entenmanns

oof ouch owie my (clogged) intestines

lol I haven’t done something like that in ages

probably because I’ve been single, but still

I think this can be a useful survival strategy for corporate environments but I’m extremely skeptical of its ability to actually improve things for your fellow workers. At best maybe you can help yourself and some of your friends for a while. But I’d still put it in the survival strategy box not a genuine tactic to change anything in a broad or lasting way (unlike, say, worker organizing, though that’s got it’s risks too).