"I’m seeing how empowering users needs to be at a much more social level, having communities that can technically communicate with anyone but practically need to set loose boundaries in variety of ways, having the personal and collective ability to “tune out” messages and people and entire communities that are abusive or just uninteresting to them."
This reminds me of "We could allow people to post to only a small subset of users and grow the recipients to more people if the readers upvote the post" from http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/mailinglists.html
This isn't really an issue but I thought you might find https://blog.foad.me.uk/2019/05/15/from-open-source-to-open-communication/ by @julianfoad interesting, especially this quote (emphasis mine):
This reminds me of "We could allow people to post to only a small subset of users and grow the recipients to more people if the readers upvote the post" from http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/mailinglists.html