It would make messages mutable (or perhaps expose an immutable history, but make the ‘current’ reference mutable, like git does)
As an aside, git is about as good a fit as NNTP (which is to say, neither is really all that good in my opinion).
Git has immutable messages, but it also has mutable references (branches) for edits, and the references can be deleted for retractions. It has a tree structure for comments. It has pseudonymous authentication (sign your commits). It has plenty of room for data and metadata (e.g. specify a standard mapping filenames to headers). It can run over HTTP and has existing servers and clients including Javascript ones. It can be deployed in a centralized model (everyone pushes to the same server) but others can mirror your server using the same protocol, and there are RSS and email gateways available. Messages (commits) have globally unique IDs, allowing for incoming links. It makes your server state trivial to backup and to mirror. I could go on.
In fact, someone has already thought of this and wrote a similar system, called GitRap! (I didn’t know about it before I checked just now.) It doesn’t do exactly what I described, and it’s tied to github right now, but you can view it as a POC.
To be clear: I am 95% not serious about this proposal. Solving the vastly simpler centralized problem is probably better.
As an aside, git is about as good a fit as NNTP (which is to say, neither is really all that good in my opinion).
Git has immutable messages, but it also has mutable references (branches) for edits, and the references can be deleted for retractions. It has a tree structure for comments. It has pseudonymous authentication (sign your commits). It has plenty of room for data and metadata (e.g. specify a standard mapping filenames to headers). It can run over HTTP and has existing servers and clients including Javascript ones. It can be deployed in a centralized model (everyone pushes to the same server) but others can mirror your server using the same protocol, and there are RSS and email gateways available. Messages (commits) have globally unique IDs, allowing for incoming links. It makes your server state trivial to backup and to mirror. I could go on.
In fact, someone has already thought of this and wrote a similar system, called GitRap! (I didn’t know about it before I checked just now.) It doesn’t do exactly what I described, and it’s tied to github right now, but you can view it as a POC.
To be clear: I am 95% not serious about this proposal. Solving the vastly simpler centralized problem is probably better.
I think that’s a terrible idea and it is awesome that it exists. :-P