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Lots of people, including myself are quite confused by exactly what Urbit is. It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to su

Lots of people, including myself are quite confused by exactly what Urbit is. It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes. I'll take a stab at it, as someone who just spent five minutes skimming its description of its address space, and trying to parse people's varying descriptions of the project. I'd love it if someone more familiar with the project could tell me how off-base I am. - Urbit is a virtual computing platform in-which all devices (ships) are members of federated network. - The federated network is hierarchically organized in such a manner that anyone can join, and receive a unique 128-bit address, but you're incentivized to join as a child of a node on the next level up the hierarchy (in-which case the first 64 bits will be your address, and the next 64 bits are your parent's address). - your address is cryptographically signed by the parent, which serves as a reputational voucher. Your parent node also serves as a package manager for your vm(?). - This system allows network nodes to ostracize branches of the network of ill-repute, in order to incentivize parents to 'disown' bad actors, as well as good clients to transfer to parents that don't vouch for bad actors. - your vm is just that. A sandboxed computing environment in-which to exectute arbitrary code/applications either pulled from your parent node, or exchanged between you and your peers, as well as a mechanism to store and cryptographically sign data data you've generated/data that others have generated which you've cached.

mgn01 6y ago
It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.
- bigyikes 6y ago
  Maybe I’m just a dummy but... that sounds a lot more complex than systems I am familiar with
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  It's mostly a component of how deliberately obtuse the terminology behind it was early on (with no clear explanation), and how smarmy the early adopters are/were about describing it early on. I knew a guy who was big into it back in 2013. He refused to describe it as anything other than 'everything you could ever want computing to be'. Ask for specifics, and he'd just use the project's own terminology and act like you were stupid if you wanted clarification. Personal server doesn't really do the project justice, because it does nothing to differentiate it in someone's mind from spinning up a vm on digitalocean with no specific intent. It will make more sense once the platform actually has software you can point to, but it'll still need more explanation to justify its existence.
  - mgn01 6y ago
    While both are personal servers, I think Urbit is (and can be) a lot more friendly to average person than telling Average Joe to setup a vm in digitalocean and then through some magic make it communicate with your friends.
    - crocodiletears 6y ago
      Which is kind of my point. The layman isn't going to get the meaning of 'personal server', but the term itself is too broad for the technically proficient. Like describing ios as 'windows on a phone'. The interaction models are completely different, and so to are softwares that most people would want to use on or is even available for it. Nothing about Urbit as I understand it is fundamentally alien to most developers save its nomenclature, and the way it's architected. But without that base of knowledge, the advantages and limitations of its model - and by extension its applications, are hard to wrap your head around.
bitwize 6y ago
> It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes. Let's see if I got the Urbit sales script down: The internet and conventional computing are broken. The only way for people to regain control over their digital lives is to completely reinvent them. Urbit is that reinvention, a distributed platform that gives you a personal cloud that's as easy to manage as your smartphone.

mgn01 6y ago

It wants to be secure personal server that anyone and their mother can setup and use. I have hard time understanding how people have hard time understanding this. It's not that "complex" guys.

bigyikes 6y ago
Maybe I’m just a dummy but... that sounds a lot more complex than systems I am familiar with
crocodiletears 6y ago
It's mostly a component of how deliberately obtuse the terminology behind it was early on (with no clear explanation), and how smarmy the early adopters are/were about describing it early on. I knew a guy who was big into it back in 2013. He refused to describe it as anything other than 'everything you could ever want computing to be'. Ask for specifics, and he'd just use the project's own terminology and act like you were stupid if you wanted clarification. Personal server doesn't really do the project justice, because it does nothing to differentiate it in someone's mind from spinning up a vm on digitalocean with no specific intent. It will make more sense once the platform actually has software you can point to, but it'll still need more explanation to justify its existence.
- mgn01 6y ago
  While both are personal servers, I think Urbit is (and can be) a lot more friendly to average person than telling Average Joe to setup a vm in digitalocean and then through some magic make it communicate with your friends.
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    Which is kind of my point. The layman isn't going to get the meaning of 'personal server', but the term itself is too broad for the technically proficient. Like describing ios as 'windows on a phone'. The interaction models are completely different, and so to are softwares that most people would want to use on or is even available for it. Nothing about Urbit as I understand it is fundamentally alien to most developers save its nomenclature, and the way it's architected. But without that base of knowledge, the advantages and limitations of its model - and by extension its applications, are hard to wrap your head around.

bitwize 6y ago

> It seems like most people familiar with it have internalized its conventions to such a degree, that they can only describe it in the most broad and unspecific of strokes. Let's see if I got the Urbit sales script down: The internet and conventional computing are broken. The only way for people to regain control over their digital lives is to completely reinvent them. Urbit is that reinvention, a distributed platform that gives you a personal cloud that's as easy to manage as your smartphone.