4 ms·

Marketting spiel incoming. You use Reddit to share link, Twitter to keep up with people, and IRC for real time chat. In all of those cases you are trusting a th

by chc4 9y ago

Marketting spiel incoming. You use Reddit to share link, Twitter to keep up with people, and IRC for real time chat. In all of those cases you are trusting a third party corporation that they aren't keeping you data forever and they won't arbitrarily ban you. You can switch to alternatives like Mastodon or, like, voat but it's really the same problem: now you're just trusting a different server, and being banned still means you lose all your content and new players on the block have to bootstrap up an entire new corpus of content and userbase. Instead, you could use an Urbit app that does Reddit-ish things, and when a developer makes a Twitter alternative the userbase already exists. Because each user hosts their own content, developers don't have to host servers, and migrating to another Reddit-like app is really just switching to a different UI frontend. Whats more, since it's /your server/, you can integrate with existing 3rd parties: mirror all your posts to actual-Twitter or use Urbit as a client, and gradually migrate over to the decentralized platform without having to overcome market effects.

tptacek 9y ago
Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? I really think that's the question people are asking when they say they don't understand Urbit. Not, "why would we want to do what this system claims to let us do", but rather, "why would we want to do it that way?"
- chc4 9y ago
  Do you have something in mind? Using GNU Social as a convient whipping-post, it's built on PHP and MySQL and Salmon and PubSubHubbub and... The point of Urbit is to be a cobherent, self-contained platform. Every other decentralized app I've seen had to reinvent several wheels and can't interact with each other because of it. Urbit has a typed versioned filesystem exposed as a global namespace, typed RPC with a diff/patch system, an identitt system, forces apps (and the e tire platform) to be purely functional for easy saving and crash tolerance, and other fun things. It's like shitty OSX - it has a /vision/, even if some parts don't make sense.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The problem I think a lot of people have with this system is that they agree with you: the underlying concept of an overlay network with abstracted addressing and an embedded programming language VM is straightforward, and may indeed be useful. Since all the core technological ideas in this system are simple enough to be undergraduate projects, why not just wait until someone builds one out of conventional components? You get the irony of complaining about how every competing design has had to "reinvent several wheels", right? The system you're advocating reinvented ASCII.
    - munin 9y ago
      I think urbit started out as a pomo critique of modern academia and tech, with heavy jargon and wheel rebuilding. Then, some other people started taking it seriously. I’m not sure if that is the best or worst outcome for this kind of joke.
      - jolux 9y ago
        Moldbug hates pomo though. Pretty sure the dude doesn't read anything that was written after the year 1900.
        Karunamon 9y ago
        Sorry, Pomo? Can’t get a good definition via the googles.
        grzm 9y ago
        Post modernism
        munin 9y ago
        Don't you know, the Moldbug persona is separate from the persona that develops Urbit!
        9y ago
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  I am very interested to hear about other competing P2P overlay network with embeddable VM of similar maturity.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    "Of similar maturity"? What does that mean? What is one mainstream application --- let's define "mainstream" here as having more than 10,000 active users --- that is built directly on top of the Urbit stack?
    - sanxiyn 9y ago
      By maturity I meant something like "continuous opeartion for a year with cryptographically signed live update (including cryptography themselves, implemented in VM)", which Urbit did. But okay, I am also interested in competing projects of any maturity.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Because implementing cryptography in a bespoke VM is an important feature? Why? That's the kind of thing cryptography engineers try to avoid.
        sanxiyn 9y ago
        You haven't named even one competing project. I think it is a good justification for interest in Urbit.
- defen 9y ago
  Theory: only a system as esoteric as Urbit could generate the necessary asabiyyah to actually pull this off. It's not just a tech problem, it's also a social engineering problem. As in, how can you self-select for only the smartest, most dedicated people to build your system? Well, allow me to introduce you to Hoon https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/
  - likeclockwork 9y ago
    Well, there's a question of who I want engineering my social reality in addition. I think there's quite a lot of selection going on and the criteria are much broader than just just "the smartest, most dedicated" engineers.
- ineptech 9y ago
  > Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? Urbit claims to be uncrackable. Not "secure when well-configured and patched regularly" uncrackable, but "Put one on an EC2 instance and tell the world there's 50 BTC inside it and come back in five years, or fifty, and your money will still be there" uncrackable. That's its selling point - that you could run server apps on it (in some hypothetical future where someone has written some useful apps) and not have to be a part-time sysadmin like you would if you ran any sort of *nix server. I'm not saying that's true, I'm just answering your question. More details on why they claim it to be that way here: https://urbit.org/blog/2017.5-frozen/ https://urbit.org/blog/2017.5-frozen/

by chc4 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? I really think that's the question people are asking when they say they don't understand Urbit. Not, "why would we want to do what this system claims to let us do", but rather, "why would we want to do it that way?"

chc4 9y ago
Do you have something in mind? Using GNU Social as a convient whipping-post, it's built on PHP and MySQL and Salmon and PubSubHubbub and... The point of Urbit is to be a cobherent, self-contained platform. Every other decentralized app I've seen had to reinvent several wheels and can't interact with each other because of it. Urbit has a typed versioned filesystem exposed as a global namespace, typed RPC with a diff/patch system, an identitt system, forces apps (and the e tire platform) to be purely functional for easy saving and crash tolerance, and other fun things. It's like shitty OSX - it has a /vision/, even if some parts don't make sense.
- tptacek 9y ago
  The problem I think a lot of people have with this system is that they agree with you: the underlying concept of an overlay network with abstracted addressing and an embedded programming language VM is straightforward, and may indeed be useful. Since all the core technological ideas in this system are simple enough to be undergraduate projects, why not just wait until someone builds one out of conventional components? You get the irony of complaining about how every competing design has had to "reinvent several wheels", right? The system you're advocating reinvented ASCII.
  - munin 9y ago
    I think urbit started out as a pomo critique of modern academia and tech, with heavy jargon and wheel rebuilding. Then, some other people started taking it seriously. I’m not sure if that is the best or worst outcome for this kind of joke.
    - jolux 9y ago
      Moldbug hates pomo though. Pretty sure the dude doesn't read anything that was written after the year 1900.
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        Sorry, Pomo? Can’t get a good definition via the googles.
        grzm 9y ago
        Post modernism
      - munin 9y ago
        Don't you know, the Moldbug persona is separate from the persona that develops Urbit!
        9y ago
sanxiyn 9y ago
I am very interested to hear about other competing P2P overlay network with embeddable VM of similar maturity.
- tptacek 9y ago
  "Of similar maturity"? What does that mean? What is one mainstream application --- let's define "mainstream" here as having more than 10,000 active users --- that is built directly on top of the Urbit stack?
  - sanxiyn 9y ago
    By maturity I meant something like "continuous opeartion for a year with cryptographically signed live update (including cryptography themselves, implemented in VM)", which Urbit did. But okay, I am also interested in competing projects of any maturity.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Because implementing cryptography in a bespoke VM is an important feature? Why? That's the kind of thing cryptography engineers try to avoid.
      - sanxiyn 9y ago
        You haven't named even one competing project. I think it is a good justification for interest in Urbit.
defen 9y ago
Theory: only a system as esoteric as Urbit could generate the necessary asabiyyah to actually pull this off. It's not just a tech problem, it's also a social engineering problem. As in, how can you self-select for only the smartest, most dedicated people to build your system? Well, allow me to introduce you to Hoon https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/ https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/
- likeclockwork 9y ago
  Well, there's a question of who I want engineering my social reality in addition. I think there's quite a lot of selection going on and the criteria are much broader than just just "the smartest, most dedicated" engineers.
ineptech 9y ago
> Right, but you could do that with any P2P overlay network with any embeddable VM. Why use the very unorthodox one that Urbit came up with? Urbit claims to be uncrackable. Not "secure when well-configured and patched regularly" uncrackable, but "Put one on an EC2 instance and tell the world there's 50 BTC inside it and come back in five years, or fifty, and your money will still be there" uncrackable. That's its selling point - that you could run server apps on it (in some hypothetical future where someone has written some useful apps) and not have to be a part-time sysadmin like you would if you ran any sort of *nix server. I'm not saying that's true, I'm just answering your question. More details on why they claim it to be that way here: https://urbit.org/blog/2017.5-frozen/ https://urbit.org/blog/2017.5-frozen/