This is a subject that strongly matters to me. I too would love to see a return to non-proprietary, open communication protocols, open source software and decentralized hosting - everywhere on the Internet, not just on Less Wrong. This is one of the few capital-C Causes in my area of professional competence that I would happily donate a lot of labor and/or money to, if only I knew of a way to promote it. But I don't, and I don't know of anyone who does.

To argue that the problem can be solved in the LW microcosm would need to either take advantage of LW-specific community features, or explicitly not solve the general problem (e.g. by not scaling, or by admitting that some things would always remain Web-only and non-interoperable). If either one is the case, please mention that explicitly.

Like gjm, I immediately want to jump the inferential distance to the usual unsolved problems. (E.g., how do you handle 'graceful degradation' for people who encounter a necessarily web/http link for the first time, so the community can grow and people with regular blogs can link to it?)

It might help if you add explicit disclaimers saying "please don't bring up issue X, that's for a future post". Are there things you don't want to talk about before a certain point? Is your sequence planned out enough (and short enough in practice) that I should refrain from anticipating certain issues, even in separate posts?

I fear that my comment(s) might appear negative, focusing on problems that I don't know how to solve before you even posted about them. I very much want this conversation (and the wider LW 2.0 one) to be constructive! If you think there's a better way for me to engage with it, please don't hesitate to tell me so. And thank you for taking the time to advocate a solution to a problem I deeply care about.

ETA: also, I would very much enjoy myself writing posts on subjects like "Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client" (or as it's sometimes known, The Web Is Not The Net), "The Proper Placement of User Features (is at the clientside)" aka "separation of protocols from implementation", and so on. I just didn't think it was on-topic for LW. But if you make it on-topic, then I might just join in.