Admin team of LGBTQIA.Social Mastodon instance received abuse email from Russian censorship agency, where they demanded to remove an account. The account in question represented a small group that ran a collaborative blog for LGBTQIA youth and adults in Russia.
Shortly after refusal to comply with agency’s demands, the instance was blocked and is now unreachable from Russia.
All previous blocks of Fediverse instaces in Russia were related to hosting CSAM.
I feel the best way to deal with this type of crap is to pretend like they’re some unimportant random person.
Do not respond at all. When they send another email, auto-reply with the same message. Then reply this after their third email:
The P.O. box number given doesn’t exist. But international mail is slow so it will take them two months to realise that.
Obviously they won’t give too much of a shit and they’re not going to send any mail, they’ll just block the server like they would anyway. They are, however, going to be annoyed to be treated as insignificant nobodies. So all in all not a bad idea.