Your history explains who reads the word "publisher" differently. It does not change what the link can be checked against, and that is where the proposal has to survive. A specified link type records who claimed what, and that alone is worth something: an index stops guessing, even when it still cannot verify the claim. Last time I argued the claim becomes checkable over time. Answer "artist" today, carry a roster of five next year, and your own feed contradicts you. That argument needs an index to keep a clock and a stored baseline, the exact state an index should not invent. A flag with no consequence for the declarer fades, because the only person who could lose by lying pays nothing either way.

One part needs saying plainly. Provability of the link says nothing about who is allowed to write it. If a solo artist and a roster label both write the same attribute with different values, and an index treats both identically until something contradicts one, the attribute records a claim and changes no decision. Still worth having, just a smaller instrument than the thread implies.

The thread measures its own appetite: thirty comments and seventy replies, open since October 2023, still no implementation.