Sci-Fi-fantasy tangent:
In a previous life I worked on Intentional Programming, and we were really looking at a medium of exchange beyond ASCII where you were empowered to point and say "that!". It worked...very well. And the long tail of this would go beyond programming...replacing all the text widgets on your system with ones that could do direct projectional editing on top of a graph that was UUID based under the hood.
I want to be able to federate and form agreements on how you will memoize things (e.g. even to have different people disagreeing about what the word "Red" means and in what context). Then to have some way of hinting or giving guidance when you're in a conversation with someone(s) where their view is going to be a diff from yours.
Being able to do so means there has to be an understanding of what the speaker meant when they said something. Today's machine learning tools can give people a big leg up on helping to "intentionalize" and harden their semantics at edit time...and I haven't been looking at any of that.
Anyway--in my fever dream--if someone wanders into a conversation where other people are talking about Red-the-language as "Red" but they don't know what it is...they might see it render as "red-lang", but with a heads up that the people around them are seeing it as "Red". What you see by default and how much diff is given is based on your established network weightings in that context. You can weight individuals or larger nodes that aggregate consensus.
I'd like to see something that is powered by such diffs on emergent consensus of whose opinions you think are important be the replacement for things like DNS. I see things like NameCoin as being (like most crypto solutions) little better in the end than what they purport to replace. It's still a pyramid scheme...and its only "decentralization" is it protects against execution of fiat authority outside of bounds of an agreed-upon contract. That's better than nothing, I guess? But I'm hard pressed to think it's worth it to burn up the planet's energy supply on something that doesn't do what I actually want: which is to give the average person a practical form of self-determination when they walk into a system that has established power positions.
TL; DR: I agree... no JSON or Rebol or anything of the sort is equipped to give me the far-future decentralized protocol that lives in my imagination. (And the likely-nigh-impossible efforts of trying to build something that egalitarian and live in such a distributed world are almost likely to be wiped out by some Borg-like Facebook-or-Google-or-whatever hive mind, before getting anywhere near off the ground.)
I'm not sure how deep I want to dive, I just want to catch up on what people have been doing since I stopped last paying attention to the problem.
I stopped paying attention however many years ago, because I was happy enough with what I had--for what I was trying to do. But I'm no longer happy--and kicking myself for my complacency/laziness. It's gotten to the point of ridiculousness...the examples are rampant. Meetup trying to charge you $2 to RSVP for events (I had trusted Meetup when I was organizer of the Austin C/C++ group, this trust was misplaced). Ten years of contribution to StackOverflow only to find it taking the content and link strength and throwing everyone who trusted it under the bus.
It was easy to tell myself that not using Facebook was enough. But I can't keep my head in the sand anymore. It's making me rethink a lot of things...including where-instead-of-Spotify to put my music playlists, or any other group-shareable content I generate.
How Rebol plays into any of this is admittedly not clear. It's just that whatever I use and evangelize next is not going to be some-site-run-by-some-guy. It needs to be something you can build, run, and understand yourself. Besides Rebol being a language I'd like to continue to work on, I do think it has offerings here regarding how to get as close as you can to a do-it-yourself layman-readable system, that fits in the palm of your hand including its full bootstrap...and yet actually does something modern and useful.