George Kadianakis:
this is an experimental mail meant to address legitimate usability concerns with the size of onion addresses after proposal 224 gets implemented. It's meant for discussion and it's far from a full blown proposal.
Taking a step back here, I believe the size of the address to be a really minor usability problem. IPv6 adressses are 128 bits long, and plenty of people in this world now access content via IPv6. It's not a usability problem because they use a naming—as opposed to addressing—scheme to learn about the appropriate IPv6 address.
While I do think we should think of nicer representation for the new addresses than base32, and we should adress that, working on a naming system sounds like an easier way out to improve onion services usability than asking people to remember random addresses (be them 16 or 52 characters-long).
(I now plenty of people who type “riseup” in the Google search bar of their browser to access their mailbox… They don't even want to/can't remember an URL. Hardly a chance they will remember an onion address, whatever its size.)
Maybe it would be worthwhile to ask the UX team for input on the topic?