Well, that does make DW seem like a tiny speck on Google's horizon. Thanks for digging up so many stats and doing so much math on that; those are some truly eye-opening results.
*is sad for our relative speckiness*
Where our thoughts kind of diverge is where you write, "So at a guess, Dreamwidth is not such a significant blip on gmail's radar that a human being would ever be prompted to examine Dreamwidth's trustworthiness status", because the way I see a possible answer to this is in the fact that it's not how big or small Dreamwidth is, it's how much can we trust the reputation, longevity, and current visible/knowable behavior of any website, regardless of its size.
If....if there was something like a cross between Google's rankings for websites (which more and more do seem to sift for trust, reputation and reliability factors, overall) and Web of Trust, but for email servers...I'm just not sure exactly how it would be done as far as nuts and bolts go but I'm thinking that unlike WOT it could be mostly automated/algorithm driven and then checked over by a WOT-like team, only perhaps a paid team with volunteers as opposed to the entire (unpaid) Internet that WOT draws from now to rate All The Websites.
And from this vague and fuzzy idea I'm having that's sort of hurting my brain to flesh out, a whitelist that stays updated in real time can be created, perhaps distributed to major email providers, and any checking against it for safe or unsafe senders, say when some website's MX records suddenly change, can also be automated, requiring followup only when a) the website is having other problems or b) other obvious red flags become apparent.
As to the friend at Google, it pains me to show my age by recalling the web as a much smaller place than it is. I had (to this day a completely unknown) friend at Wordpress who kind of helped me out back in the day (without me asking!) when even Wordpress wasn't too big (but it was getting pretty big!). Of course as a user of the site, blah blah blah...(I guess he or she was a a fan, but as they chose to remain anonymous, I'll probably never know exactly what inspired them).
So, there might be billions of websites of every stripe and flavor but there are only so many social media sites with longevity, good reputation and loyal users; even if Dreamwidth ranks at the low end of userbase among them, it surely must rank (actually, I'd be curious to know where on the scale of most-used social media sites it stands, but my gut feeling is it's at least pretty well known). Silicon Valley et al pays attention to social media and knows who's who, so it just rankles me a bit that communication can't be better than it is.
Re: a friend at Google
*is sad for our relative speckiness*
Where our thoughts kind of diverge is where you write, "So at a guess, Dreamwidth is not such a significant blip on gmail's radar that a human being would ever be prompted to examine Dreamwidth's trustworthiness status", because the way I see a possible answer to this is in the fact that it's not how big or small Dreamwidth is, it's how much can we trust the reputation, longevity, and current visible/knowable behavior of any website, regardless of its size.
If....if there was something like a cross between Google's rankings for websites (which more and more do seem to sift for trust, reputation and reliability factors, overall) and Web of Trust, but for email servers...I'm just not sure exactly how it would be done as far as nuts and bolts go but I'm thinking that unlike WOT it could be mostly automated/algorithm driven and then checked over by a WOT-like team, only perhaps a paid team with volunteers as opposed to the entire (unpaid) Internet that WOT draws from now to rate All The Websites.
And from this vague and fuzzy idea I'm having that's sort of hurting my brain to flesh out, a whitelist that stays updated in real time can be created, perhaps distributed to major email providers, and any checking against it for safe or unsafe senders, say when some website's MX records suddenly change, can also be automated, requiring followup only when a) the website is having other problems or b) other obvious red flags become apparent.
As to the friend at Google, it pains me to show my age by recalling the web as a much smaller place than it is. I had (to this day a completely unknown) friend at Wordpress who kind of helped me out back in the day (without me asking!) when even Wordpress wasn't too big (but it was getting pretty big!). Of course as a user of the site, blah blah blah...(I guess he or she was a a fan, but as they chose to remain anonymous, I'll probably never know exactly what inspired them).
So, there might be billions of websites of every stripe and flavor but there are only so many social media sites with longevity, good reputation and loyal users; even if Dreamwidth ranks at the low end of userbase among them, it surely must rank (actually, I'd be curious to know where on the scale of most-used social media sites it stands, but my gut feeling is it's at least pretty well known). Silicon Valley et al pays attention to social media and knows who's who, so it just rankles me a bit that communication can't be better than it is.