It does!
I’ve long nurtured a mental metaphor of a long-running MMO containing all game maps ever, which never deletes anything. So you can wander into an alleyway and find Doom, 320x200 resolution, and buy it from John Carmack to make a theme park. Besides just being cool on that level (ahaha), the metaphor at its logical conclusion becomes immutable data = the subatomic particles of a parallel universe (to which we’re not native, but that’s a whole other tack, for which beer is needed).
I don’t want to impose on you with newb questions on the overall vision so I’ll keep reading up on that.
In the meantime I can see how CRDTs fit into it, thanks. Just intuitively, the requirement to tolerate arbitrary byzantine faults requires at least a consensus protocol (I see it here in bft-crdts), which means that allowing for network segments or disappearance will require that consensus can be deferred, which could make the eventual merge, um, interesting. Also being aware that preserving user intent in CRDTs is still a matter of active research, it might be an idea to linearise history when you get the chance, since you have consensus for the byzantine tolerance anyway, and fall back to CRDT behaviour when partitioned. Apologies for the half-formed thoughts.
To relate this to m-ld, I would paint the following picture. m-ld is currently intended for small-corpus replicated data sets, to support realtime collaboration. To the Network it could be nothing more than an opaque application-level file type that utilises the network messaging to synchronise, with its own protocol. At this level the value to the end-user is to make collaborative editing pervasive in Safe Network apps. Shooting myself in the foot, you could use Yjs or automerge for that.
More magic happens when m-ld data is integrated, or subsumed, into a wider network of RDF data, in which ‘datasets’ or ‘files’ disappear in favour of a global semantic graph, which is always available and always writeable. Semantics, including integrity and intent preservation, are a matter of declaration, not of a parochial technology choice in an app.
This is your level playing field, I think, and it’s level at all levels: the superpower it gives is the freedom to climb the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy. Humans and AIs are free to process any data and infer any wisdom, and have it be available to all, safely.