Yeah, "thinking bigger" about JMAP might be a trap, sigh. I'd have to agree that JMAP may be better just being email-focused as we could really use something like that right now. Still, at the very least, it's always good to have some versioning to have a way of upgrading the protocol. I also wonder if there is some "low hanging fruit" for generic data exchange that JMAP could perhaps address better -- but I agree sometimes the low hanging fruit is dangling over a fast-moving river filled with alligators on a branch that would break if you put too much weight on it.

Lotus Notes and CouchDB (designed by someone with Notes development experience and related aspirations) are projects that do have quite a bit of alignment with what I am talking about. And they can be useful systems even with their limits. Notes suffers from being proprietary and having warts from its evolution (including how apps are implemented). CouchDB suffers the limits of trying to be both a database and a server at the same time and hitting limitations in both areas. It also unfortunately had a logo that could be misinterpreted as something offensive. That said, I do like CouchDB a lot as an inspiration and seven years ago or so I wrote a small app that runs on top of it.

Thanks for mentioning Urbit. After a brief perusal of their mission and code and a HN article on it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8578151 ), it seems to me at first glance (perhaps not doing it justice) like a new flavor of Lisp (but with math limited to increments to produce a functional-ish Flux-like model) crossed with a bunch of techno-utopian aspirations about personalized distributed computing backed with some code and a lot of hand-waving. One can also see the economic model in there to please investors by creating an artificial scarcity of address space that is auctioned off. So it is a set of sense and nonsense it would take a while to sort through -- but so often the challenge in life is doing that for our own beliefs given everyone believes many useful things and a few problematical things. Certainly a lot of things it points to are worthwhile aspirations (like having more control over your own data) whatever one may think of the implementation. Some of its aspirations (the ones I'd tend to agree with more) are reminiscent of the FreedomBox project -- but without FreedomBox's practical grounding in mostly repackaging existing Linux technology.

In practice, these days I'm thinking more about a set of npm packages that make it easy to create your own personal server with a combination of "npm install" commands to add new capabilities (including perhaps a JMAP server for some of your data that could be interpreted as email-like messages). Ideally, that personal server could be federated with servers from other people using some standardized APIs (some of which may be very CouchDB-like). And if people need a unique identity (or several), that could be done by people providing public keys to others as their "identity" and using such keys for signing messages. That's a way to realize some Urbit-like aspirations in a more down-to-Earth way, but leveraging the Node ecosystem instead of how FreedomBox leverages the Linux ecosystem.

Here is a message I sent in 2010 to the Diaspora project along similar lines:
"Raising the bar to supporting a Social Semantic Desktop"
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/diaspora-dev/TNNpvfFqN...
"So, you can take all of my technical comments with a grain of salt in the
sense of all that ambition (or whining or paranoia. :-) I acknowledge these
suggestions are pretty ambitious, as above, and such ambitions would ask
that the Diaspora team learn a lot about emerging ideas and do some really
difficult things involving some bleeding-edge semantic stuff beyond the new
(and good) stuff it is already doing -- and that it is possible such
ambitious and risky efforts might fail for all sorts of reasons. Still, I
contacted the Chandler/OSAF project about the Pointrel system semantic
approach and they went another more mainstream way and failed anyway (well,
it's still ongoing, but it lost its way and most of its funding somewhere
along the line). But, I learn more each time, so maybe the above might seem
more coherent and approachable than what I sent the Chandler/OSAF people
years ago, and that in private, not in public where at least others could
learn from it. :-)
It's quite reasonable for anyone to say that, for now, a Semantic Web is not
what Diaspora is about, as no one can do everything. But somehow, I feel,
the really big future for something like Diaspora is going to be integrating
semantic web concepts. So, at the very least, if Diaspora was built in such
a way as to support future modules in that semantic direction, it might be
an even more successful thing that totally and rapidly eclipses Facebook and
many other technology platforms as well."

I wish I had more time to pursue these ideas in an open way other than as a hobby taking too much time away from family -- and involving unhealthily spending way too much time on the computer overall on top of regular 9-5 work time. I'm obviously personally invested in these ideas and enjoy programming in this area. But it's also a tough moral choice about spare time given the need for such systems to have a happier singularity factored against the very real costs to any individual/group and a very low probability of success for each specific effort. But collectively, if enough people try (alone or in small groups) in their own ways, likely somebody will succeed -- and then a larger group can build on that success in a stigmergic way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

Still, while such an effort to create an alternative may indeed be a trap of wasted effort for no results, what we have now with global use of (anti-)social media -- media designed to addict people and provide 24X7 surveillance and control of information flow via a few centralized services -- is a trap we're already collectively in.

Unfortunately, some people who I might otherwise think should know better -- like Paul Jones, UNC professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Science and of ibiblio fame -- seem to promote the centralized social media technology of this trap. They have given up on email due to spam, information overload, and other issues like asynchronicity -- and replaced email by collection of mostly commercial web services rather than try to make something better inspired by email's good aspects including local archiving and local search. See: "UNC professor Paul Jones went from pioneering to protesting email"
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/unc-professor-pa...

While centralized services do have some benefits over current email (including editing and moderating), it is not like the centralized services don't have their own new problems -- whether various forms of spam including low-quality duplicate content driven by monetization, having less time for reflection in a torrent messages with immediate response expected in some services, or even new problems where "unfriending" someone is a lot more complicated and stressful than not including someone on an email CC list.

I've posted a few comments over the years on Paul Jones' #noemail blog ( http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/category/noemail/ ) agreeing with him about email's problems -- while also pointing out obvious new problems with trusting all your communications to a few centralized services and suggesting working towards better alternatives. But those posts seem to have disappeared in what may have been a purge of most comments from that blog. That is an example of one of the perils of entrusting your messages to someone else for publication and archiving -- and a reason to consider a federated architecture as an alternative.

Still hoping he might someday promote a solution that keeps email's many benefits (including as a personal "electronic memory") while addressing the valid concerns he raises about email.

Anyway, stuff I like to think about and discuss and implement. Even though I may be reaching the point where, like many others before me, "The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done." See: http://www.manifestoproject.it/bre-pettis-and-kio-stark/

And one might then hope for continued co-evolutionary bootstrapping improvement of concepts, artifacts, services, culture, and practices like Doug Engelbart talked about. And we can see that now, like in using the web right here and now on HN to discuss something better.

So, I can totally get where JMAP-as-it-is becoming a big success would move things forward, and we could then use JMAP to discuss the next generation of changes. So, I'm raising the issue of a broader aspiration -- while accepting it might not be best for JMAP right now.