Mutual aid spam is becoming a problem on the Fediverse.
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you can find plans for $15/mo. it's not unreasonable for homeless people today to have a cell phone. even homies in prison have tiktoks.
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Again, the phone and the service, at least, when I was homeless in 2019, was covered along with other social services such as SNAP and Medicaid.
And again, I completely agree about not handing money out online. Just disagreeing about homeless folks having accessibility to a phone or the internet. And Public libraries or anywhere with wifi (if you have a phone) are other options.
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Mutual Aid is not charity. Mutual aid is beneficial fir both parties.
Mutual aid for rent would be to join a tenants union so that people can get organized and perform a rent strike.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/tenant-unions-for-the-future/
Mutual Aid for food would be something like Food Not Bombs.
(It's an http site so only sign up if you're comfortable with that.)http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/
Charity is not mutual aid.
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@Feathercrown Actually, you can do that with any Fediverse service, not just Mastodon.
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That's why I think the history of the U.S. phone system is so important. AT&T had to be dragged into interoperability by government regulation nearly every step of the way, but ended up needing to invent and publish the technical standards that made federation/interoperability possible, after government agencies started mandating them. The technical infeasibility of opening up a proprietary network has been overcome before, with much more complexity at the lower OSI layers, including defining new open standards regarding the physical layer of actual copper lines and switches.
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The plans can be super cheap compared to food and housing. A pretty poor person can still have consistent Internet now.
It's not the affordability that makes these things almost certainly a scam, but they pretty much are almost certainly a scam anyway.
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POLICE! POLICE! PLEASE HELP!
I SAW A HOMELESS PERSON!!! THEY WERE ASKING FOR MONEY
PLEASE REMOVE THESE EYESORES
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There are needs and needs, I refuse to help a money begger unless is a close friend which I can control how is the best I can do for him, money being the last resource. Instead I always demand for social programs and services sustained by taxes to support those in real need (survival needs) unconditionally.
I would sleep much better if part of my tax contribution (together that of anybody in function of their resources) goes to grant the minimum for a "dignity survival" to any human being regardless of their returned contribution, with programs for reinsertion and mental support so they have the best chances to reach eventually a "dignity life".
And, if still they cannot but just "survive" for the rest of their lives, I still want to fund it and give them the security to do it with dignity until the very end.
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Donate those that provide something meaningful.
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Read the link title - "Mutual Aid SOCIETY" - that's the organization part. Mutual aid is the helping other members part. Anyway, the topic is about these pleas for help becoming a problem on lemmy.
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Lol, comments in this thread forgot the 'mutual' part of 'mutual aid' and miss the point of this post (scams in mutual aid groups)
If you think mutual aid is a one-way street (/ don't benefit from it), is not for you, block and move on
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This is why I turn off Google spam filtering. My attention is worth nothing so everyone who can message me should be able to.
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Imagine being so dead inside that automated emails and human beings occupy the same part of your mind
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Yup. At least a decade ago I used to explain how important interoperability was to legislate for, and used this as the main example of why. Networks are better for everyone when there is no lock in, and the waste of competition for eyeballs could be avoided. It's sad that most people truly don't understand this.
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It's not really an "alt" account, I just don't think of user accounts as an extension of my identity, and change very regularly.
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I guess in this case it's OP that labeled it as mutual aid rather than the requester.
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Imagine being so naive that you think that's a real person.
But if we're not being snarky for a moment... It's trivially easy to create a bot to do exactly what this person is doing. Spam others with begging for money and a bunch of sob stories.
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Funnily enough, I haven't seen many instances delicated to just spam, like there was conerns about. Its mostly from .world or mastodon.social
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What in the honest fsck was the reasoning behind that?
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Like tumblr, "you don't understand! 90-ghost says i'm real!!"
