I have been living homeless for the last few months, here are some things I have learned:
- Every time I have gone up to a house, knocked on the door and asked to fill up a water bottle, people have always said yes
- There is a big difference in people’s minds between “travellers” and “homeless”. If you say you are travelling/exploring you will be treated a lot nicer than if you say you are homeless.
- You can ask big shops or restaurants if they have any spare/nearly out of date food and they may give you some. The worst they have said is no.
- People care a lot less than I thought. I have been cleaning my boots in a canal and no one even looked.
@mindpersephone Sometimes, rarely, when the stars and moons align and the weather and degree of light coming through the window and the volume of birdsong filtering into the house is *just right*
And taking TER trains in most of France is a disheartening experience
The vast majority of passengers are too young or too poor to have cars - they’re only here because they have no other choice
Many stations are knackered and run down
Most of the trains are modern-ish, but information provision is poor
uspol adjacent but relevant anywhere at anytime
reminder to use Signal or another encrypted messenger to talk to your friends. especially about sensitive topics that might be under heavy fire from politicians, but the more you use it for normal talk the harder it is to censor or use as a control mechanism
@pingiun Ah, I see Whitaker is still concern-trolling, towards the Haskell community this time...
@serapath It can certainly be a start, I'm just trying to avoid recommendations of platforms whose idea of mutual aid starts *and ends* with sending money to others, because more is needed 🙂
@serapath Mutual aid can take many forms - offering or asking for help with doing something, but also donations of things, money, and so on.
The core idea is that someone who has something to spare (time, money, stuff, ...) gives it to someone who is in need, and gradually setting up a mutual support network of people doing so, so that those who are having a bad time are supported by those doing better and vice versa, whatever people's current situation is.
The exact thing being given or received doesn't really matter, as long as it fits that idea 🙂
not really answering the question
@alive That's more or less the conclusion I'd come to, yeah. I have some ideas about how this problem could be approached, but I wanted to check first whether someone else had already done it, before accumulating Yet Another Project...
@serapath Mutual aid is, crucially, a selfless act by default, so payment should not really be a factor to begin with
(I have nothing against financial mutual aid to be clear, but "sending the same dollar around fifty times among mostly-all-poor folks" is not a sustainable revolutionary strategy, even if in the short term it is certainly helpful)
Is there some kind of mutual aid matchmaking platform, preferably decentralized in some way?
Commercially run platforms do not qualify, nor do "you can technically do mutual aid here" platforms, I'm really looking for something with an ideological basis in mutual aid that actively encourages it.
Note that "mutual aid" here is not a euphemism for just "people asking for / offering money", I mean mutual aid in the broader sense, including doing stuff for people that they need
@schratze Also I just found out this thing costs several hundred euros and I am somewhat surprised at the landlord going through such expense
@schratze Ah, landlord sinks.
@gsuberland@chaos.social I have a special frustration with software that does this automatically for crash recovery, but when you manually exit it, it forces you to choose between save/discard.
Like, the functionality is *right there*, give me a button to use it that doesn't involve force-killing the process!
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
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Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.