Right Wing Dust Storm
I find it quite unfortunate that there are resources like Riseup.net to supply all kinds of communications packages to Communist terrorist group AntiFa. I tripped over another resource called disroot.org, and it seems to have a very post-modern radical left-wing vibe to it too. I took one look at it and decided, "We can do better."
The first thing I found necessary in my journey in creating this project, is the requirement for as much anonymity to the degree of plausible deniability as possible. Now, that's just not going to happen for me, because I've used this pseudonym, typing style and all, that I can easily be fingerprinted in my speech across the Internet. I mean, there was a woman in one of my old World of Warcraft clans that did exactly that to me, just for funsies. Sure, the results were creepy, but I think she was just having fun in the process of just doing it. However, when I want to raise this as a service for others, I simply can not have it easily traceable to a living person.
Well, that's ballsy, isn't it? How would you go about doing something like that, Shari? Well, I would start from the beginning: Buy a voicemail account. Once I do that, then I would move on to creating a Google Voice account. That way, 2FA can functionally happen for someone, easily.
After that, we can move on to getting a domain. Thankfully, there's free domain hosting out there that just takes some tender, loving care to keep upright. Maybe, just maybe, you want a more permanent and interesting domain. Well, I'm not a domain registrar yet, but I'd find a good, solid one that wouldn't jerk with you, hopefully. Additionally, I'd go and start a Cloudflare account as well.
From there, it's time to start asking yourself: How many, or of what kind of services, would I want to provide for my group? At the moment, I'm running a very large amount of services from a VPS with 2 "virtual CPU cores", 4GB RAM, 60GB storage, and 3TB total throughput bandwidth (equal to roughly a constant 10Mbps/1MBps).
The "dust cloud" in the name is the concept that hey, if someone goes and attacks you at one location/provider, we can just lift up and drop it down somewhere else, start everything back up, move some pointers around, and we're back in business.
I'd also like to manage it myself, by hand, as little as possible. As well, I would like to have my users be able to have all of their own metrics and control as possible. Login through a dashboard to see the health and junk of your VPSes, be able to modify and configure - where possible - the various services running. Maybe even spin down and spin up new services willy-nilly. Definitely want you to be able to have absolute control of the data running on these VPSes. Keep everything on my servers as encrypted as possible, as well, which means that everything would have to get encrypted and decrypted by the individual logging in, which could mean a rather thick burst of data that needs to be downloaded and reuploaded every time, as I'd want to keep the configuration data for any application running on the servers, on any control server's disk for as little time as possible... Even better kept in RAM and only dumped to disk when it's time to save a permanent, encrypted copy.
Would you be interested in helping donate or buy some of these sorts of services? Do you have other ideas on what I could add? I'm going to start building this up on my MakerSupport and Hatreon pages (neither of which are able to accept pledges at the moment)
MakerSupport: https://www.makersupport.com/sharivegas
Hatreon: https://www.hatreon.com/Sharivegas