You're right, that was a misleading example. I changed it to data.json to be more clear.
> If you publish a dat archive, how do you notify Hashbase to pin it? Can you do it through dat? Does it require setting up an account on Hashbase, providing an email address, linking a credit card, etc.?
The "Pinning" system is very similar to Git remotes. You can pin using any endpoint that complies with https://www.datprotocol.com/deps/0003-http-pinning-service-a.... So, similar to a git remote, you do need some kind of authentication with the pinning service - unless somebody writes one that's open for anybody to push to.
The UX flow will be similar to a git remote as well, you use an HTTPS to tell the server to sync the dat. So, it's an explicit user action.
We've got two nodejs implementations of the pinning service API you can self-deploy, https://github.com/beakerbrowser/hashbase and https://github.com/beakerbrowser/homebase, and then we run a Hashbase instance at hashbase.io