This is a crosspost of a post to the public-socialweb@w3.org list:

> Hello all!
> 
> A friend (Aeva Palecek, she said it was okay to reference her here) and
> I have been discussing ways in which distributed communication can
> help/harm those who are at risk of targeted harassment campaigns.  Her
> list of thoughts/concerns are below:
> 
> Her list is:
> 
> <aevas_list>
>  1. lack of redundancy - while communication is distributed, one's
>     online presance is not.  If your server gets DDOSed and you don't
>     know how to mitigate the damaged, you are silenced.
>  
>  2. not all of us are sysadmins - I can set up a VPS, but being able to
>     set one up securely is a profession all on its own.
>  
>  3. lack of filtering tools - no ability to reduce line noise from
>     people spamming.  The service may as well actually be offline if
>     you have to sift through large volumes of putrid hate speech before
>     you can read anything from your friends and loved ones
>  
>  3. a. curated block lists are effective tools - "block bot" is a
>     popular one that people use on twitter.  Tools like this let a
>     group of people who trust eachother to curate and add to the list
>     based on their interactions with people.
>  
>  3. b. sockpuppet accounts are common ways to circumvent block lists,
>     but if someone is receiving a high volume of messages (or just
>     wants to), there should be an option to prevent accounts with 0
>     customization, too low amount of follows, and/or too new from
>     communicating with you.  Afaik, twitter lacks this.
>  
>  4. If you are following the rules and want to have full control over
>     your domain name, you basically have to dox yourself to have an
>     online presence, or have to invest a bunch of money to keep
>     yourself (eg, buy a PO box to use instead of your home address, or
>     register an L3C or something to use instead of your name).  Can we
>     please move away from this horrible approach?
> 
>  (Some additional feedback from Aeva: #2 is an issue of making
>  deployment easier, and maybe something along the lines of onion
>  services is a response to #4.  A hidden federated service, possibly
>  built off of tor, would not only solve problem 4, but maybe make
>  everything but #3 less damning.)
> 
> </aevas_list>
> 
> I'm not proposing any thoughts of my own in this email... I think it's
> best to let hers take center stage.  But I'm interested in peoples'
> feedback on how we can make federated technologies more responsive to
> these needs/concerns?
> 
>  - Chris