In that vein, perhaps there is a call for a protocol/RFC whereby each person's public comments live on their own server, and a comments section, such as HN, wou

In that vein, perhaps there is a call for a protocol/RFC whereby each person's public comments live on their own server, and a comments section, such as HN, would just return a bunch of links (or even just a root link, with child links being distributed with each comment)? The client would be responsible for constructing the comments page by contacting each individual server. Maybe hashes could be used with each link, so a client could flag any after the event rewriting? It's got a NNTP flavour to it, if clients start doing caching and the NNTP client's view is threaded, but the idea would be that the canonical copy remains on the author's server, where they retain control of and responsibility for what they write. Its also RSS like, in that a server's output could be viewed as a stream of comments? It would be a bit like a blog, but each entry would be linked into a conversation/comment page by the client, possibly with selective downloading if comment are collapsible. It's basically SMTP, but instead of the server sending a message once, a client could contact the server at some point in the future and request a retransmission of a particular message. Is there already an RFC or protocol that fills this niche?