Neat idea! It was interesting to read up on UUCP just now. New reinvents old.

Oh that's a really fascinating (and mildly disturbing yet not surprising) tidbit, see what they are up to there.

Again here we have an example of providers making decisions in the middle of what should otherwise be neutral communication.

However, if the user is the one who is doing the negotiation, ie- setting the price they demand for new inbound messages from untrusted parties - does this mitigate your concern? There could be also a zero or low fee kind of 'spam' box the interface builds in that ultimately allows for anyone to send a message to anybody (or endpoint) provided there is some way to reliably transmit those messages (which depending on our design could result in the same fate as an exceedingly low fee on a BTC tx).

Exactly these are local blockchains (with free addressing/hashing out of the box) that each node can install/include as part of its (Docker and/or perhaps Nix) stack to provide verifiable file integrity. This hypothetical protocol could then be used to reflect that verification in the user's UI to show them that they are indeed looking at the correct file & that everything is working as intended.

Since each node can run Git or ZFS in isolation there is not one 'the blockchain' to download; operators are hosting mini-blockchains and can choose to host/sync/replicate as many or as few of them as they so desire (ie- maybe you just want to host your own website and thats it - others might choose to host your site or a number of their favorite sites - a documentary filmmaker might choose to host his films).

Either way, some kind of distributed index/ledger mechanism can be deployed in whereby each node broadcasts the last time it performed a proof of confirmation/integrity check for having the correct checksum of a given file that has been published to said index, or for broadcasting new files. This is where I have been actively researching where Bitcoin integrates - as you know it's the world's best timestamping system. And possibly we can even creatively store the index directly on the blockchain too. Tangent: initial design doesn't necessarily need it since ZFS/Git + http + torrents and checksumming should make replication/downloading/delivery reliable and hopefully fast enough but I have even seriously evaulated Bitcoin SV since you got unlimted block size to work with there and so content could actually be hosted directly on the chain (... Craig's chain, that is... yeah have pretty much scrapped that idea)

Extra points btw both Git and ZFS have snapshot/revision capabilities that make it trivial to empower the user to roll back to previous versions and verify the hash/checksums for historical files too. Imagine having that capabiltiy built into Wikipedia. Right now we just have to trust that their "History" page is not hiding/skipping certain changes from purview.

No problem as you can see I have no quams ranting on here. I'm coding everyday on this so it is always fresh on my mind; also working towards a public beta but one-man product development can be rather slow pace. The main driver is that I want to share and publish content knowing it's not going into a black hole. And I think a lot of talented devs & content creators alike out their realize they are increasingly playing a rigged game by publishing content on the www - sure you can avoid the controlled platforms/social media and publish on to your own domain (and pay increasingly gouging annual renewal prices). But even SEO spam aside there's a deeper dark pattern affecting the discovery of blogs and independent sites - primarily the issue is search engines are queitly pruning/adjusting their algos to intentionally block these very independent sites by design (YouTube glaringly bad but you are seeing the same thing slowly happen to Google results too).

Had a somewhat popular Geocities website back in the day and maybe you also recal a special charm about that era. Good old Yahoo category index would let you browse the web and discover at your own pace. Non JavaScript by default internet is also something I long for again (despite being a full stack JS coder today).

You are obviously on the ball - seeing similar patterns as much as I love to optimize for nostalgia and improved UX it is important to plan ahead for the worst; huge props to you on that regard indeed we should take cue from the signs and have something before the next 'thing' happens.

Same dillemma with money. On one hand, we need to use Bitcoin wherever possible if we will ever have a chance to sway the masses. On the other, the masses use fiat so we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I love the notion of hedging a bet on a better internet future much like Bitcoin is promising for money while straddling that balance of doing business with the devil for as long as necessary for the rest of the world to transition.

Sounds like you are working with some clientelle who need mission critical end to end file & messaging integrity.

Will do some reading up on short wave I'm completely new to that stuff. Other Bitcoiners are experimenting with HAM too so you will at least have a small market of guys willing to launch blimps with you :)