Look at the semiotic theories stemming from Ferdinand de Saussure over a century ago: he would reverse the relative importance of your 1 and 2, arguing that words derive most of their meaning from their arrangement and interrelationships, and that most of the meaning we see in the world flows from the relationship between signs/words into our perception of their referents.

the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience.

The same argument could have been used a century ago to claim that everyday people would never switch from trains to private cars, because the effort and cost of maintaining a car exceeds the skill and interest of the travelers.

The general category of potential use case is when you want some information to be public, undeletable, and outside of corporate or government control.

While I can’t think of a compelling use case at the moment (other than whistleblowers, maybe), given the direction our corporations and government are going it seems like the sort of thing that might become increasingly useful in the near future.

Tom Waits, Mule Variations.