Georgi Guninski
IMHO two or more future lists won't hurt. Everyone can set a cypherpunks list (but won't get the past reputation of this one, if any).
This is how cpunks was run from 1997 until mid-2005, when this became the only node. It was called the CDR (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer). It's a nice idea in theory, but (with all respect) the original implementation was far from pretty; kudos to Jim Choate and Igor Chudov for making it work at all :) In principle it should be pretty straightforward to make a "distributed mailman" setup work. The high-level idea is that all the servers accept messages, and all messages get forwarded to all servers. Then each server decides based on local policy which messages get delivered to users. For example, someone might decide they want to run a cpunks node that's moderated, and the important thing is that only their subscribers would see the moderated version of the list---subscribers to another node could get the full feed. The server-server forwarding stuff is like 10 lines of procmail, and requires no changes to mailman. The part that gets slightly hairy is implementing subscriber-only filtering [1]. In a naive setup, every node needs to know every other node's subscriber list. In addition to the (completely surmountable but sometimes annoying) issues with distributed synchronization, this is potentially a privacy concern for list subscribers. One step toward fixing this would be for lists to blind their whitelists. For example, a list could publish a set of SHA256 hashes of suscriber addresses, or maybe even something more clever, e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8356 But this still isn't perfect. For example, when a subscriber sends an email, each server gets to see which whitelist the subscriber matched against, which means that servers can keep track over time and build up a mapping from active posters to home nodes. This might not be a problem, but it's worth considering whether there's some approach that would fix this without too much computational overhead. [1] I understand that there are reasons to have a fully unregulated list, but in my view subscriber-only filtering plus whitelisting known remailers gives a good balance between ease of posting and good SNR. If I recall correctly, the LNE.com CDR node was the first to implement this policy, and I followed Eric's lead because it was far and away better than what came before it. -=rsw