&gt; <i>replacing HTTP URLs for naming content is necessary and nearly sufficient</i><p>It depends what you replace them with. I quickly skimmed your essays looking for any proposals, but didn&#x27;t quite see anything.<p>The obvious thing is Freenet-style public signing keys, but while this helps decentralize distribution (a boon to a person who wishes to publish anonymously - upload and run), the standard centralized naming hierarchy will form, at least for introduction.<p>The well-known &quot;HNS&quot; &#x2F;com&#x2F; will just be 8b844459891e8f1840bfc4200e758483 instead of the DNS 192.5.6.30 (a.gtld-servers.net). Likewise, after introduction a discussion board would be known as 659f177ebea794e4e74f0708d832f65e (even if it is Petnamed) instead of news.ycombinator.com.<p>Public signatures are simply one layer and not the full solution, in the same sense that hash trees of immutable content are only one part.<p>What is important is <i>forking</i>, which relies on the ability for differing forks to be intelligently reconciled in an automated fashion. I should be able to use a version of &quot;HN&quot; where a specific user is&#x2F;isn&#x27;t banned, and still communicate with you (presuming that <i>you</i> want to, rather than whoever is running the popular &quot;HN&quot; aggregation node), even if you yourself are using a third version.<p>I think it ultimately comes down to the data model supporting some concept of &quot;merge points&quot; rather than strict top-down immutability&#x2F;persistence. With these merge points and rules specified by the endpoints&#x27; schemas according to the users&#x27; desires. But it&#x27;s awfully hard thinking about this stuff since I also keep seeing how any specific approach can calcify and turn into similar prescriptive monoliths as we have today.