5 ms·

No it won't. All these federated protocols are doomed to die out of spam, centralization, censorship churn. People really have to watch what Urbit is doing and

by dpc_pw 6y ago

No it won't. All these federated protocols are doomed to die out of spam, centralization, censorship churn. People really have to watch what Urbit is doing and understand why. Anything less is insufficient.

olah_1 6y ago
ActivityPub isn’t great, but anything is going to look bad when compared to a utopian pipe dream. Im looking forward to a better comparison in Q4 or Q1 2021 when Urbit is more usable for regular people though. As of now, I don’t suspect that anyone will pay $10 for a VPS and $5 for (reliable) star service. It should be noted that when I critiqued ActivityPub here a couple months ago, a main developer of the spec was very supportive and already on top of the improvements that I was hoping for (such as being less reliant on servers, more true decentralization, etc)
- riffic 6y ago
  Urbit isn't going to be anything. It's the TempleOS of this space.
  - rimjongun 6y ago
    As somebody who went to all the trouble of: 1) Converting cash to Bitcoin 2) Transferring the Bitcoin to my browser plug-in wallet that was the only approved way to pay for the “planet” or whatever 2) Purchasing the planet and somehow linking my ID with their registrar/account info 3) Downloading and trying to installing the software despite several dependency issues with the stock Ubuntu (or whatever they recommend) VM. 4) Finally getting it working, being greeted by a truly bizarre user interface, I figured out how to get into chat. Joining the main channel, my screen was flooded with out of order chat messages. In a project that’s been around since 2012. I was really excited to experience the new wave in computing. I found smoke and mirrors. Cool idea though.
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  It's not a pipe dream. I'm using Urbit on a daily basis, and this year I'm having a blast with it - in particular because of high barrier to entry, the conversations there are really great with the most geeky and motivated people. Lots of features are there, it got faster, more stable. There's no need to pay for anything. Urbit planets are usable from desktop, and don't really need to be turned on all the time. Urbit should have no problem eventually running from a phone, which is like 99% online device for me anyway. Federation of services running on Unix machines is just not going to work. That's how Internet used to work, and it was not practical so it degenerated into what we have right now.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    Full disclosure I have been on Urbit (probably talked to people for 3 hours in total and spent 12 hours total setting it up and tinkering with Hoon). Great conversations with interesting people has exactly zero bearing on the quality of the project. I have had great conversations on IRC. You do need to pay for a planet of course (because of the “skin in the game” concept that urbit people are obsessed with). But I’m speaking of paying for Star service though. Yes, stars are free now, but the whole point of Stars is that they will not be free. Otherwise they will serve you ads or do some other things to be sustainable. And in my experience, stars should be a paid service even today, because the connections are so unreliable that it is just beyond frustrating. If Urbit is a toy, it’s a really good one. If it’s a tool for communication, it’s terrible and you’re better off with literally anything else. I mean, it doesn’t even have notifications so idk how it’s useful for a communication today. That’s why I’m saying to just wait til Q4 or Q1 and see where it’s at. Why are you poo pooing federation when Urbit is a federation of Stars? What are you even saying? Every decentralized mesh network today still requires a federation of relay servers. Unless you’re talking about going around the whole networking stack as it is today. But in that case, nobody would need federation and Urbit wouldn’t be the only solution for that either. My comment is overly long already, but I feel compelled to also say that Urbit is bad for privacy today as well.
    - dpc_pw 6y ago
      > Why are you poo pooing federation when Urbit is a federation of Stars? Because I own my own identity, and can move it to another star quite seamlessly without losing my ID and all connections I've made. And I'm not a second class citizen in the system because of that. With Federated protocols I can create my own instance, sure. Then I do own my identity, at the cost of all the administrative overhead and being a second class participant. Spam and abuse are an unsolved problem at the core of the legacy Internet and all these federated protocols can't do anything about it. If I own an instance I have to deal with it (spam and other abuse) myself, and constantly fight the fact that other people think I might be a potential abuser myself, which puts people on minor-instances at a disadvantage. So natural economic and social forces constantly push the system to centralize and that's exactly what we're seeing with everything on the Internet.
sschueller 6y ago
Urbit is a centralised Ponzi scheme. A few control the entire system.
pmlnr 6y ago
Urbit, lol. Yeah. If anything, Xanadu[^1], but that's a thought, a philosophy, and it'll probably never happen. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
INTPenis 6y ago
It's not a game changer but it is an important component. I view it in this way; all throughout the 90s and 2000s there were message boards. We used to be active on dozens of them, and each had their own account and avatar. Each also had a little community and an admin. Each cost money to run and had to scale. The only thing that's changed with AP is that now all those tiny communities can come together with federation. You can communicate between communities and users. That's all! It doesn't have to be more complicated or dangerous than that. You'll still have dedicated admins who pay for hosting with their time and money. You'll still have communities around these admins who contribute content and perhaps donations. But to be able to communicate across communities and not have dozens of accounts is a big step forward to me.
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  It used to be like what you describe, and there's a reason it degenerated to what is now. Project that try to resurrect the losing model, without addressing why it is doomed to lose, just didn't learn their lesson.
StavrosK 6y ago
> People really have to watch what Urbit is doing and understand why. Even though Urbit is trying its best to prevent that?
- dpc_pw 6y ago
  Yes. As much as I disagree with naming, aesthetics and some other details, the diagnosis of the problem (why the Internet degenerates into a handful of centralized super-hosts), and the fundamental prescription: "we need an universal, self-owned identity and reputation layer, to combat the abuse and make it a saner, easier to manage place" are true.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Do you have an invitation? I'd like to check it out.
    - dpc_pw 6y ago
      You don't need any. You can start with a "comet". A self-generated ID (like a self-gen SSL cert, kind-of) and try it out.

by dpc_pw 6y ago

olah_1 6y ago

ActivityPub isn’t great, but anything is going to look bad when compared to a utopian pipe dream. Im looking forward to a better comparison in Q4 or Q1 2021 when Urbit is more usable for regular people though. As of now, I don’t suspect that anyone will pay $10 for a VPS and $5 for (reliable) star service. It should be noted that when I critiqued ActivityPub here a couple months ago, a main developer of the spec was very supportive and already on top of the improvements that I was hoping for (such as being less reliant on servers, more true decentralization, etc)

riffic 6y ago
Urbit isn't going to be anything. It's the TempleOS of this space.
- rimjongun 6y ago
  As somebody who went to all the trouble of: 1) Converting cash to Bitcoin 2) Transferring the Bitcoin to my browser plug-in wallet that was the only approved way to pay for the “planet” or whatever 2) Purchasing the planet and somehow linking my ID with their registrar/account info 3) Downloading and trying to installing the software despite several dependency issues with the stock Ubuntu (or whatever they recommend) VM. 4) Finally getting it working, being greeted by a truly bizarre user interface, I figured out how to get into chat. Joining the main channel, my screen was flooded with out of order chat messages. In a project that’s been around since 2012. I was really excited to experience the new wave in computing. I found smoke and mirrors. Cool idea though.
dpc_pw 6y ago
It's not a pipe dream. I'm using Urbit on a daily basis, and this year I'm having a blast with it - in particular because of high barrier to entry, the conversations there are really great with the most geeky and motivated people. Lots of features are there, it got faster, more stable. There's no need to pay for anything. Urbit planets are usable from desktop, and don't really need to be turned on all the time. Urbit should have no problem eventually running from a phone, which is like 99% online device for me anyway. Federation of services running on Unix machines is just not going to work. That's how Internet used to work, and it was not practical so it degenerated into what we have right now.
- olah_1 6y ago
  Full disclosure I have been on Urbit (probably talked to people for 3 hours in total and spent 12 hours total setting it up and tinkering with Hoon). Great conversations with interesting people has exactly zero bearing on the quality of the project. I have had great conversations on IRC. You do need to pay for a planet of course (because of the “skin in the game” concept that urbit people are obsessed with). But I’m speaking of paying for Star service though. Yes, stars are free now, but the whole point of Stars is that they will not be free. Otherwise they will serve you ads or do some other things to be sustainable. And in my experience, stars should be a paid service even today, because the connections are so unreliable that it is just beyond frustrating. If Urbit is a toy, it’s a really good one. If it’s a tool for communication, it’s terrible and you’re better off with literally anything else. I mean, it doesn’t even have notifications so idk how it’s useful for a communication today. That’s why I’m saying to just wait til Q4 or Q1 and see where it’s at. Why are you poo pooing federation when Urbit is a federation of Stars? What are you even saying? Every decentralized mesh network today still requires a federation of relay servers. Unless you’re talking about going around the whole networking stack as it is today. But in that case, nobody would need federation and Urbit wouldn’t be the only solution for that either. My comment is overly long already, but I feel compelled to also say that Urbit is bad for privacy today as well.
  - dpc_pw 6y ago
    > Why are you poo pooing federation when Urbit is a federation of Stars? Because I own my own identity, and can move it to another star quite seamlessly without losing my ID and all connections I've made. And I'm not a second class citizen in the system because of that. With Federated protocols I can create my own instance, sure. Then I do own my identity, at the cost of all the administrative overhead and being a second class participant. Spam and abuse are an unsolved problem at the core of the legacy Internet and all these federated protocols can't do anything about it. If I own an instance I have to deal with it (spam and other abuse) myself, and constantly fight the fact that other people think I might be a potential abuser myself, which puts people on minor-instances at a disadvantage. So natural economic and social forces constantly push the system to centralize and that's exactly what we're seeing with everything on the Internet.

sschueller 6y ago

Urbit is a centralised Ponzi scheme. A few control the entire system.

pmlnr 6y ago

Urbit, lol. Yeah. If anything, Xanadu[^1], but that's a thought, a philosophy, and it'll probably never happen. [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

INTPenis 6y ago

It's not a game changer but it is an important component. I view it in this way; all throughout the 90s and 2000s there were message boards. We used to be active on dozens of them, and each had their own account and avatar. Each also had a little community and an admin. Each cost money to run and had to scale. The only thing that's changed with AP is that now all those tiny communities can come together with federation. You can communicate between communities and users. That's all! It doesn't have to be more complicated or dangerous than that. You'll still have dedicated admins who pay for hosting with their time and money. You'll still have communities around these admins who contribute content and perhaps donations. But to be able to communicate across communities and not have dozens of accounts is a big step forward to me.

dpc_pw 6y ago
It used to be like what you describe, and there's a reason it degenerated to what is now. Project that try to resurrect the losing model, without addressing why it is doomed to lose, just didn't learn their lesson.

StavrosK 6y ago

> People really have to watch what Urbit is doing and understand why. Even though Urbit is trying its best to prevent that?

dpc_pw 6y ago
Yes. As much as I disagree with naming, aesthetics and some other details, the diagnosis of the problem (why the Internet degenerates into a handful of centralized super-hosts), and the fundamental prescription: "we need an universal, self-owned identity and reputation layer, to combat the abuse and make it a saner, easier to manage place" are true.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Do you have an invitation? I'd like to check it out.
  - dpc_pw 6y ago
    You don't need any. You can start with a "comet". A self-generated ID (like a self-gen SSL cert, kind-of) and try it out.