16 ms·

Urbit: The good, the bad, and the insane

231 points by deegles 5y ago

analyte123 5y ago
People at large don't want their entire digital life secured by 12 words in a sock drawer in the same way that they don't want their entire life's savings secured by 12 words in a sock drawer. Urbit can't achieve mass adoption in its envisioned form without there being highly reliable peer key backup and sharing on Ethereum.
- 627467 5y ago
  I don't know if what you describe is the actual deal breaker of urbit (or cryptocurrencies in general) but I agree with the seriousness of the problem. I feel like a system with built-in identity (urbit) actually let us be a step closer to peer recovery than alternatives.
wiz21c 5y ago
TempleOS looked saner
- nix23 5y ago
  Well actually it is really sane...lets talk about windows (the not NT versions)
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  The OS was very sane. The creator had some trouble.
codezero 5y ago
Speaking of Urbit, I had/have a relatively old "ship" I got long long ago, what can I even do with it? How do I get it up and running? I think they transitioned to Ethereum, but what does that mean? lol, it's so confusing!
- jlehman 5y ago
  Just reach out to support@urbit.org if you want to get this figured out. They're very helpful.
  - crocodiletears 5y ago
    I'll second that. They also have a discord server. I had some issues getting started, but they were very helpful in helping me work through it. With respect to its utility, it's primarily a barebones chat app right now.
    - codezero 5y ago
      Thanks both of you!
voldacar 5y ago
I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and alien, which is strange because its goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  > Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, Which is why I found the point that they've implemented their UI in javascript interesting
  - voldacar 5y ago
    Agreed. That does seem strange. I guess if you want a UI that just works and is flexible, most people will turn to a web browser
- wejn 5y ago
  And there I was, thinking that the first four paragraphs pretty much summed up the frame of mind with which it was written.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  It may not have been. The author of Urbit is Moldbug, who is... controversial. On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pretty clinically detached.
  - throwaway292893 5y ago
young_unixer 5y ago
Reminds me of this article: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fvdessen 5y ago
While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value proposition. I hope one day saner apps will adopt similar concepts, or reuse the urbit identity layer for identity purposes
- wmf 5y ago
  Or you could buy a domain.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I'm sure someone will talk about your registrar potentially banning you but since your identity is tied to your public IP address that could already happen.
    - fvdessen 5y ago
      Indeed the direct link to an IP address is currently a weak point in terms of privacy, but it could potentially link to an onion address instead to solve that issue. The point is that your identity is on a globally available and immutable blockchain instead of someone's db you must trust
- bruiseralmighty 5y ago
  This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I mean if that's the only value. Facebook, but only for people who pay $100/yr, would be an easy way to create a high signal-noise social network and unfortunately it isn't.
jlehman 5y ago
Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html
- wejn 5y ago
  Interesting. I thought that I was tearing down the fact they took the brilliant new idea, and bastardized it beyond recognition, and in multiple ways. I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the execution.
  - jlehman 5y ago
    You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"? It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for nearly two decades. It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.
    - majewsky 5y ago
      If you cannot adequately explain the appeal of a new technology to your peers after having worked on it for a week, that's nothing to worry about. After 20 years though? That's very worrying.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- api 5y ago
  There's a lot of survivorship bias in that kind of thinking. They called Galileo mad, but they also called simultaneous five dimensional time cube guy mad.
  - golemotron 5y ago
    His name is Gene Ray.. His name is Gene Ray.. His name is Gene Ray..
mjfl 5y ago
Urbit is a prank that has somehow lasted for a long time. If you look at their version of machine code, Hoon or whatever its called, it's purposefully obfuscated so that, just to add two numbers together requires I think 4 different instructions. I did my OS class final project on it 6 years ago...
- tomphoolery 5y ago
  my first reaction was "is this language descended from brainfuck??"
  - astrange 5y ago
    Is that a problem? I've seen Haskell written in terms of Peano arithmetic and that's like the same thing. (* did not read the article yet)
- dwb 5y ago
  You could choose to not read it as a prank, then it might be more interesting. I don't doubt there is an amount of purposeful obfuscation in the naming at least, and there clearly is a desire to be different. But looking beyond the surface, there is a coherent system there that I think deserves being judged as such, if you're going to judge it at all.
- lisper 5y ago
  > Urbit is a prank I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
  - vzcx 5y ago
    If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius? As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.
aaroninsf 5y ago
If anything the author is too generous. In particular, in leaving room that the cultishness (call it a clique, or, a droll derive through the hyperspaces of language fetishization) is less than intentional. Yes, it's a cult; no, there is no sekret killer app. People like to play, like to be exclusive, like to feel holier than though, doubly so when it's dressed up as droll and all in good fun. Or as "locker-room talk." This is what happens when Robert Anton Wilson fails fast.
gryn 5y ago
last I saw urbit a long time ago, the only thing I could think of is that it was a social experiment to see how much vague nonsense people a willing to take and how long it would take for people to reach that consensus. a more elaborate version of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8
_peeley 5y ago
I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific language with a familiar syntax would be better, since at least a first-timer could grok basic logic/structure at first glance. This only compounds the security concerns, since reviewing any Hoon code requires being a domain expert - I doubt any security/crypto researchers will want to take a few weeks to learn Hoon just to audit something as obscure as Urbit. Hoon even has a kind of Lisp-y feel to it and Lisp lends itself well to the purely functional goals of Hoon/Nock, so I don't see why they couldn't have just made Hoon a Lisp. On the whole however, I'm hesitantly optimistic about the project. Most other works aiming to address Internet centralization just seem like band-aids (federated social networks still have problems with moderation/deplatforming, self-hosting just means running it in someone else's data center, etc.), and Urbit seems to be one of the few things willing to deal with the fundamental problems from the ground up. Also, I'm kind of glad the author didn't mention Urbit's original author despite most other posts on the topic feeling the need to mention it. He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll never be rid of his influence. At this point I just feel bad for the maintainers/users that will constantly be associated with the guy from now on.
- gowld 5y ago
  > He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll never be rid of his influence. The major design concersns raised by the above comment and the OP are inseparable from the original author, because he chose an extremely idiosyncratic language and system design that eschews all known standards and practices. If people want to make the idea work, they should port it to a reputable language.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address space? I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.
peanut_worm 5y ago
I have a friend who is into Urbit. It seems like a social club at this point.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I once got far enough into Urbit to reach something like a chat room. I think I may own a star, or planet, (a medium sized entity - not a large or huge one) if I can find where I put the key. I have been meaning to explore more. Glad to see it is still around.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I'm on urbit from time to time. It feels very much like old Usenet of pre-eternal-September time ... and I guess that is closely related of the system being obscure and not technologically easy enough to let just about anyone join without some effort.
tern 5y ago
If you're interested in an articulation of what's exciting about Urbit from one of the core devs, this recent launch event hosted a great conversation: https://youtu.be/_aRnfacZPto?t=3224 https://youtu.be/_aRnfacZPto?t=3224 (run-time 1hr and a good deal of it is about Urbit+Bitcoin specifically). One thing I've enjoyed and learned a lot from while participating in blockchain and Urbit communities is the sheer difference in valance of conversations, from "this is entirely useless to the point of being a joke or fraud" to "the rest of the world is insane and finally something makes sense." There is irrational exuberance on both sides, but also deep, grounded takes diametrically opposed in their conclusions. To be human!
- tadfisher 5y ago
  I think we focus too much on the technology and too little on providing real value. The value of blockchain networks is trustless distributed consensus, but a blockchain is one possible means to provide that value, and current implementations have undesirable tradeoffs and externalities. Urbit is a means to provide ubiquitous network-native computing, but it's a pretty terrible environment to use and live in. Focus on the value proposition and these paradigm shifts could actually happen and benefit mankind.
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tombert 5y ago
My manager at a previous job a few years ago told me about Urbit, I found the website, and I was extremely confused to what it actually was. Re-reading it now, I'm still a little confused.
- Nzen 5y ago
  I'm of the impression that it is an internet reimplemented on top of the internet that we are using right now. So, you download a vm emulator, like uxn [0]. This able to use a specific protocol to reach out and communicate with other vm emulators of its kind. But, like the tls namespace, my vm doesn't just reach out to macwrite.com/index.html . It has to go through my switch, through a series of switches of my and other commercial ISP datacenters, until it reaches the server that manages 'com' and then finds the server with the webpage I want. But, that requires people to forward that traffic with their own vm emulators. So, Tlon, the organization that sponsors the urbit ecosystem, sold address space for 'galaxies', which are like the top level domains. They are expected/encouraged to lease out address space to many others, as 'stars', who will relay traffic up and down. Finally, laggards are expected to rent address space and subscribe for bandwidth from the star operators as a 'planet'. A vm without a star, a comet, to, I don't know, sign its traffic, can not communicate with other vms on the network. That is what I've concluded urbit is. Urbit is sold as the opportunity to reimplement all of computing on top of this system. Like compilers ? They have a language they are building this stuff with. Like OS ? They need to flesh out the vm that you use. Like some application thing ? They probably need that too, reimplement all the things: text editor, web server, build system, and on and on. And you can be pretty sure that your work will be used, because it's a small community and they are apt to need your thing, and it can be a jewel that isn't carrying forty years of compatibility compromises [1] and exploration that was press ganged into production. [0] https://100r.co/site/uxn.html https://100r.co/site/uxn.html [1] http://perfectionkills.com/the-poor-misunderstood-innerText/ http://perfectionkills.com/the-poor-misunderstood-innerText/
  - vzcx 5y ago
    You are somewhat wrong about how urbit works. Stars and galaxies don't really work as routers. They are more like DNS servers: they provide the peer discovery mechanism, translating from urbit IDs to public hosts and ports. Most communication is peer-to-peer. Software updates still flow down the tree from the root, but as I understand, they are looking to make that more flexible, though this poses some technical challenges. When you have an urbit planet, it's yours, and no star or galaxy can take it from you. There isn't a "lease" arrangement, it's bona-fide cryptographic ownership. Comets are currently served by the galaxies and can communicate with any other VMs that are willing to talk to comets, and at this stage in the network, that's basically all of them.
dwb 5y ago
I find the incredulousness around urbit's differences and ambition very tiresome. I have an urbit ship, I bought the identity when it was not so expensive. I've hardly used it; I'm not a pioneer sort of person and I've not found the time to get into Hoon. I'm not at all a true believer (to extend the cult comparison, which strikes me as unfair too); I think there are a few concerns you could raise (I agree on OTA updates and address space, and would add governance and power relations). But I for one welcome an ambitious re-thinking of (a subset of) computing and I wish them the best. I mean, run it in a VM or something and probably don't use it for anything sensitive right now. I want to live in a world where people have a go at unconventional things.
captainmuon 5y ago
The only good thing about Urbit are the Jorge Luis Borges references. Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas: http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right. From 2007 to 2014, he authored a blog called "Unqualified Reservations", which argued that American democracy is a failed experiment, and that it should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance. He is known, along with fellow neo-reactionary Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. I find there are tendencies among some people in tech to bring upon what I would consider the crypto dystopia. Cryptocurrency is one such idea. Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. It enshrines a kind of cutthroat capitalism with the ruthlessness of an algorithm. (When it works as indended. Currently it's mostly used as a ponzi scheme or to buy drugs, but that's a different story.) An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc., but the culmination of this idea is certainly Urbit.
- meowface 5y ago
  >Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) I'm not sure where Yarvin stands on cryptocurrencies. He's indeed very anti-democracy and pro-monarchy, but that's exactly why I think the attempted connection doesn't work. I don't think it's fair or accurate to tie him or his ideology to the general concept of cryptocurrencies or their advocates. I'd wager the vast majority of advocates probably strongly disagree with him on most things. I think they would largely consider themselves democracy maximalists, even. Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far the most well-known thing about this odd project. If you ask anyone what Urbit is, their answer is very likely either going to be "what?" or "that inscrutable thing that neo-reactionary blogger made". It usually takes up about 95%+ of any Urbit discussion anywhere online. >An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. Why? Also, there are some cryptocurrencies that don't have either of those things. And for the ones that do, "cryptographic identity" just means "a public key", like a PGP key; not necessarily your real personal information. >In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc. Why the need for the equivocative qualifier? What's potentially unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general categories of ideas? (Perhaps beyond the sorts of illicit activities any sort of decentralized technology, like Tor, can enable.) I'm not a big cryptocurrency supporter and recognize ~99.9% of it is Ponzi schemes and other varying degrees of hot air - and there are certainly a lot of highly pessimistic ideas I disagree with that are common among the community (e.g. that central banks are malevolent or that the US dollar is likely to collapse in the not-too-distant future) - but it's unfortunate how these things seem to always reduce to two radical poles that are pretty much equivalently ideologically closed-minded. (I'm certainly pulling a https://xkcd.com/774/ https://xkcd.com/774/, with zero qualms. I 100% agree with the character on the left, in this context.)
slakrems 5y ago
To me Urbit is a non starter because it was founded by Moldbug who is an incredible racist and they don’t hire people of color.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
If it's so bad, why is it so comfy? Maybe it's just because it's so much effort to get into it that it acts as a filter (like the old web) and the UI design is great.
lxe 5y ago
Finally, a human-readable explanation of Urbit!
ianbicking 5y ago
I actually think some of the underlying ideas Urbit is trying to pursue are interesting and have real potential: 1. Deterministic computing seems really interesting. It gives you something that is reliable and portable and replicable. It means you have to be very clear about everything that isn't deterministic, mostly I/O, and that's worth being clear about. I find determinism the more interesting part of pure functional programming, but I don't think you need a functional language to have deterministic computation. 2. Portable identity and communication are also interesting, they are necessary formal concepts if you are going to treat computation abstractly. 3. It's not crazy that you access this abstract concept of an OS using HTTP APIs and out-of-OS web frontends. It feels a little like smoke-and-mirrors since so much of what it "does" is actually the browser and JavaScript, but eh. That said, Urbit is a terrible expression of these ideas. The expression of computation (Nock) is absurd. Jets seem a little clever, but it's really an fragile extension of the idea of JITs, but based on idioms to make up for Nock being unable to express basic computational concepts (like negative numbers). As a result the Jets are essentially the Real Bytecodes. I guess it's a little like the evolution of CPU microcode, but entirely unnecessary as Nock as no legacy or advantages that need to be preserved. The language Hoon is the worst obscurantism I've ever seen. People will claim it's productive once you learn it, but I don't believe them one bit, the programs are long-winded, full of weird boilerplate, and just bad. They cover this up by making it seem that the programs _do_ something notable, but they don't. Most of the programs would be 100 lines in Node.js, they are just moving a little data around to rich (browser/JavaScript) clients. There's no decent abstractions for an OS. The whole concept of the Urbit machine is that it's one big opaque bundle of bytes. There's no documents. There's no applications. There's no separation of concerns. There's no consideration that a usable system requires lots of different parties (OS makers, application developers, API developers, cloud services, etc) coming together, and there's no sense that managing the complexity of that intersection is something an OS should do. There's no security. There's no permission model. There's no capability model. There's no firewalls between anything. It's like if you ran Python on bare metal and called it an OS. That said, I bet someone could do something really cool in this general area using WASM, contained in something that acted like an OS but wasn't much more complicated than an execution container.
severak_cz 5y ago
It reminds me LuaOS[1] - an distributed operating system written in lua communicating with users via XMPP. I wrote for it an "unix-like shell simulator"[2] (see [3] for example session log) and earned honorary title "early adopter". :D It was not really usable, mostly fantasy console running in another fantasy console, but I learned coroutines while working on it. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/pages/mobile-lua.php https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/... [2]: https://gist.github.com/severak/3927004 https://gist.github.com/severak/3927004 [3]: https://gist.github.com/severak/3927054 https://gist.github.com/severak/3927054
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vlmutolo 5y ago
> What that means at the time of writing2 is that it’s a single-threaded interpreter running as a unix process that speaks udp protocol to a meshed network (and http to your browser). I've looked up Urbit a couple times before, and this paragraph is the first time I ever even had an inkling of what it was.
deegles 5y ago
For those that are curious to try Urbit, you can boot a free identity called a comet in just a few minutes: https://urbit.org/getting-started/ https://urbit.org/getting-started/ Once you have it running, go to http://localhost:80 http://localhost:80 to use the web interface (Landscape). The Urbit Community group is the most active. Just hit "Join Group" the main page and enter "~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community"
- hderms 5y ago
  What do people commonly discuss on it?
  - vzcx 5y ago
    On that group, they mostly discuss urbit. There are a lot of other interest groups with varying levels of activity: cat pictures, art, cryptocurrency, tech, emacs, politics, finance, ham radio, weightlifting, cars, tea... All the different kinds of stuff that people discuss on the web.
- arthyn 5y ago
  It'll get even easier on Thursday, check out https://github.com/arthyn/port https://github.com/arthyn/port for a preview.
deleted 5y ago
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chrisallick 5y ago
you should rewrite "bit of history" => "urbit of history" can't let a pun like that go.
sneak 5y ago
Note that contributing to this ecosystem as a user or developer is likely to enrich the founder of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, who despite having resigned his position with the company, likely retains equity in the company and valuable/scarce assets in the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race This is not a warning for or against, but it's always best to participate (if indeed you do) with eyes open.
- anon_d 5y ago
  We should encourage people to express dissenting views. The idea that we should do anything in our power to avoid good outcomes for someone that expressed ideas that we don't agree with is worse than hateful and evil: it's stupid and self-destructive.
  - sneak 5y ago
    I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe certain humans are more suited to being slaves than others, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant. Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich racists and segregationists is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.
    - creamytaco 5y ago
      Wikipedia is pretty biased and far from an arbiter of truth, especially when it comes to summarizing someone's life, beliefs and personality. A lot of what Yarvin has written is prescient and extremely incisive. Just because his views and models of the world do not align with the current cultural zeitgeist does not mean that he should be silenced or branded a racist. I get the feeling that most of the people that criticize him have not spent even 10 minutes reading him, but propagate regurgitations they've read/heard. This is not the mark of a healthy society.
OldGoodNewBad 5y ago
I find it odd that all the comments complaining about Yarvin’s non-leftist beliefs are still up here. We’ve had plenty of threads about things whose creators were raging Marxists and so on, if anybody complains that’s the end of your account here. His politics aren’t n Urbit so if you leftoids can keep your bile down it’d be greatly appreciated.
cropcirclbureau 5y ago
Anyone know other similar projects? (personal VMs in the cloud for everyone. Bonus points if it supports for deployment of dApps) The closest I've come across are: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ https://polypoly.coop/en-de/polypod https://polypoly.coop/en-de/polypod ...but these are purely data storage, they expect the processing to happen on other machines. Some powerful scalable server polling everyone's "data pod" to do what it does. Which is much more realistic and efficient than Urbit I suppose but it raises concerns about what the third party software running on somebody else's server's doing with your data. Running VMs for everyone sounds inefficient indeed. Urbit's opting to provide (what I assume to be) a lightweight OS/runtime for the apps that are accessing your data to run on is reasonable though it's still very much a single process for each single user at the least. Rolling your own OS/runtime allows you to make optimizations for this specific use-case but I don't know how far that'd take you. Maybe you can offload the processing to the client machine when it's available? If you're going to mostly be deploying distributed apps anyways...sounds like an engineering challenge though. Apps written for your platform will be facing interesting requirements (restraining most of it to bits that need to interact with the data stored in the "pod" helps but I suppose that's detail). But maybe the inefficiency's the toll we'll have to pay to get away from the centralization problem. I personally find the idea of running thousands of VMs used to deploy P2P apps in a data center painful. But maybe that's what we'll have to resort to until we have devices in everyone's pocket that we can reliably deploy P2P apps on. Besides the distributed chat/forum and social media, I bet you can replace the entire Google suite with this. After all, your Google account is in a sense, a way to access a VM in the cloud where you can run an assortment of apps on. How hard would it be to set up an Urbit clone using software existing today anyways? Top of my head, I can think WASM, WASI, libP2P, IPFS coming in handy.
- arthyn 5y ago
  No need to clone just come build on Urbit :)
textprotocol 5y ago
Urbit's Sigils can be aesthetically pleasing [1][2]. # sha3sum <<< 'textprotocol@github' | urbit | sigil | convert svg:- jpg:- | jp2a - [1] https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils/ https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils/ [2] https://github.com/textprotocol/sigil https://github.com/textprotocol/sigil

231 points by deegles 5y ago

People at large don't want their entire digital life secured by 12 words in a sock drawer in the same way that they don't want their entire life's savings secured by 12 words in a sock drawer. Urbit can't achieve mass adoption in its envisioned form without there being highly reliable peer key backup and sharing on Ethereum.

627467 5y ago
I don't know if what you describe is the actual deal breaker of urbit (or cryptocurrencies in general) but I agree with the seriousness of the problem. I feel like a system with built-in identity (urbit) actually let us be a step closer to peer recovery than alternatives.

wiz21c 5y ago

TempleOS looked saner

nix23 5y ago
Well actually it is really sane...lets talk about windows (the not NT versions)
gameswithgo 5y ago
The OS was very sane. The creator had some trouble.

codezero 5y ago

Speaking of Urbit, I had/have a relatively old "ship" I got long long ago, what can I even do with it? How do I get it up and running? I think they transitioned to Ethereum, but what does that mean? lol, it's so confusing!

jlehman 5y ago
Just reach out to support@urbit.org if you want to get this figured out. They're very helpful.
- crocodiletears 5y ago
  I'll second that. They also have a discord server. I had some issues getting started, but they were very helpful in helping me work through it. With respect to its utility, it's primarily a barebones chat app right now.
  - codezero 5y ago
    Thanks both of you!

voldacar 5y ago

I don't know much at all about Urbit, but this doesn't seem like it was written in good faith tbh. The mention of security holes seems to be the only real serious critique. Hopefully some urbit people could address those, since claiming to be a secure personal VM and just exposing your data on disk to the cloud provider is crazy. Other than that, the author seems to be mostly making fun of urbit for being weird and alien, which is strange because its goal basically seems to be weird and alien. This is actually quite excellent. Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, with a healthy dose of NIH.

iudqnolq 5y ago
> Computing needs fewer javascript frameworks and more truly weird and alien shit, Which is why I found the point that they've implemented their UI in javascript interesting
- voldacar 5y ago
  Agreed. That does seem strange. I guess if you want a UI that just works and is flexible, most people will turn to a web browser
wejn 5y ago
And there I was, thinking that the first four paragraphs pretty much summed up the frame of mind with which it was written.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
It may not have been. The author of Urbit is Moldbug, who is... controversial. On the other hand, I just read the article, and none of it seems particularly bad faith. I vaguely remember something about Urbit using planets and galaxies as some kind of ownership metaphor, so I expected the article to go on at length about how strange this seems. But it seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of Urbit, and is pretty clinically detached.
- throwaway292893 5y ago

young_unixer 5y ago

Reminds me of this article: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened

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fvdessen 5y ago

While the Urbit tech stack is clearly insane (some say it’s on purpose), The urbit identity layer is interesting and useful. You basically buy your username as a NFT, and that username is bound to signing keys, ip address and ethereum wallet. This makes it quite practical as an identity for chat / social network. This identity is on the eth blockchain and thus nobody can steal it / ban you, which is a unique value proposition. I hope one day saner apps will adopt similar concepts, or reuse the urbit identity layer for identity purposes

wmf 5y ago
Or you could buy a domain.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I'm sure someone will talk about your registrar potentially banning you but since your identity is tied to your public IP address that could already happen.
  - fvdessen 5y ago
    Indeed the direct link to an IP address is currently a weak point in terms of privacy, but it could potentially link to an onion address instead to solve that issue. The point is that your identity is on a globally available and immutable blockchain instead of someone's db you must trust
bruiseralmighty 5y ago
This is also the most compelling aspect of it to me as well. Domains being essentially free allows for too much easy spamming of internet users. Raising the cost of an identity online really helps solve a lot of the bad actor problems.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I mean if that's the only value. Facebook, but only for people who pay $100/yr, would be an easy way to create a high signal-noise social network and unfortunately it isn't.

jlehman 5y ago

Reminds me of this essay: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html

wejn 5y ago
Interesting. I thought that I was tearing down the fact they took the brilliant new idea, and bastardized it beyond recognition, and in multiple ways. I loved the promise of Urbit, and was disappointed by the execution.
- jlehman 5y ago
  You mean "after spending just a few hours poking around it"? It's a big, ambitious project that's been worked on now for nearly two decades. It seems more likely that you're disappointed by your understanding of the execution, which can be nothing but extremely limited.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    If you cannot adequately explain the appeal of a new technology to your peers after having worked on it for a week, that's nothing to worry about. After 20 years though? That's very worrying.
- deleted 5y ago
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api 5y ago
There's a lot of survivorship bias in that kind of thinking. They called Galileo mad, but they also called simultaneous five dimensional time cube guy mad.
- golemotron 5y ago
  His name is Gene Ray.. His name is Gene Ray.. His name is Gene Ray..

mjfl 5y ago

Urbit is a prank that has somehow lasted for a long time. If you look at their version of machine code, Hoon or whatever its called, it's purposefully obfuscated so that, just to add two numbers together requires I think 4 different instructions. I did my OS class final project on it 6 years ago...

tomphoolery 5y ago
my first reaction was "is this language descended from brainfuck??"
- astrange 5y ago
  Is that a problem? I've seen Haskell written in terms of Peano arithmetic and that's like the same thing. (* did not read the article yet)
dwb 5y ago
You could choose to not read it as a prank, then it might be more interesting. I don't doubt there is an amount of purposeful obfuscation in the naming at least, and there clearly is a desire to be different. But looking beyond the surface, there is a coherent system there that I think deserves being judged as such, if you're going to judge it at all.
lisper 5y ago
> Urbit is a prank I had Curtis pitch urbit to me in the very early days and I can assure you that he did not intend it to be a prank. He was deadly serious about it. I think his true motives were much darker. I think he wanted to start a cult following the model of L. Ron Hubbard. And I think he succeeded.
- vzcx 5y ago
  If you want the world to become Tlon, don't you need an Orbis Tertius? As someone who has never met Curtis but has been initiated into both the cult of urbit and the cult of lisp, I've sometimes wondered how familiar he was the works of the latter, as you can often see some familiar things when you squint, but it's covered up with strange materials, quite possibly of alien origins.

aaroninsf 5y ago

If anything the author is too generous. In particular, in leaving room that the cultishness (call it a clique, or, a droll derive through the hyperspaces of language fetishization) is less than intentional. Yes, it's a cult; no, there is no sekret killer app. People like to play, like to be exclusive, like to feel holier than though, doubly so when it's dressed up as droll and all in good fun. Or as "locker-room talk." This is what happens when Robert Anton Wilson fails fast.

gryn 5y ago

last I saw urbit a long time ago, the only thing I could think of is that it was a social experiment to see how much vague nonsense people a willing to take and how long it would take for people to reach that consensus. a more elaborate version of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8

_peeley 5y ago

I also did a deep dive on Urbit a few months back (shameless plug: https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/urbit), and I really agree with the author for the most part. Definitely the most concerning part of Urbit, for me at least, is the obscurantism of Hoon. Much like the author says, it's totally incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't read through every bit of the (lacking imo) documentation. Even a domain-specific language with a familiar syntax would be better, since at least a first-timer could grok basic logic/structure at first glance. This only compounds the security concerns, since reviewing any Hoon code requires being a domain expert - I doubt any security/crypto researchers will want to take a few weeks to learn Hoon just to audit something as obscure as Urbit. Hoon even has a kind of Lisp-y feel to it and Lisp lends itself well to the purely functional goals of Hoon/Nock, so I don't see why they couldn't have just made Hoon a Lisp. On the whole however, I'm hesitantly optimistic about the project. Most other works aiming to address Internet centralization just seem like band-aids (federated social networks still have problems with moderation/deplatforming, self-hosting just means running it in someone else's data center, etc.), and Urbit seems to be one of the few things willing to deal with the fundamental problems from the ground up. Also, I'm kind of glad the author didn't mention Urbit's original author despite most other posts on the topic feeling the need to mention it. He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll never be rid of his influence. At this point I just feel bad for the maintainers/users that will constantly be associated with the guy from now on.

gowld 5y ago
> He's long since left the project but it seems as though it'll never be rid of his influence. The major design concersns raised by the above comment and the OP are inseparable from the original author, because he chose an extremely idiosyncratic language and system design that eschews all known standards and practices. If people want to make the idea work, they should port it to a reputable language.
NationalPark 5y ago
Doesn't Yarvin still have a personal interest in the address space? I think if they insist on not rebranding, they need to make it clearer that they disavow his political stuff, since the project sort of started as a vanity implementation of his ideas about monarchy or whatever.

peanut_worm 5y ago

I have a friend who is into Urbit. It seems like a social club at this point.

ALittleLight 5y ago
I once got far enough into Urbit to reach something like a chat room. I think I may own a star, or planet, (a medium sized entity - not a large or huge one) if I can find where I put the key. I have been meaning to explore more. Glad to see it is still around.
DocTomoe 5y ago
I'm on urbit from time to time. It feels very much like old Usenet of pre-eternal-September time ... and I guess that is closely related of the system being obscure and not technologically easy enough to let just about anyone join without some effort.

tern 5y ago

If you're interested in an articulation of what's exciting about Urbit from one of the core devs, this recent launch event hosted a great conversation: https://youtu.be/_aRnfacZPto?t=3224 https://youtu.be/_aRnfacZPto?t=3224 (run-time 1hr and a good deal of it is about Urbit+Bitcoin specifically). One thing I've enjoyed and learned a lot from while participating in blockchain and Urbit communities is the sheer difference in valance of conversations, from "this is entirely useless to the point of being a joke or fraud" to "the rest of the world is insane and finally something makes sense." There is irrational exuberance on both sides, but also deep, grounded takes diametrically opposed in their conclusions. To be human!

tadfisher 5y ago
I think we focus too much on the technology and too little on providing real value. The value of blockchain networks is trustless distributed consensus, but a blockchain is one possible means to provide that value, and current implementations have undesirable tradeoffs and externalities. Urbit is a means to provide ubiquitous network-native computing, but it's a pretty terrible environment to use and live in. Focus on the value proposition and these paradigm shifts could actually happen and benefit mankind.

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tombert 5y ago

My manager at a previous job a few years ago told me about Urbit, I found the website, and I was extremely confused to what it actually was. Re-reading it now, I'm still a little confused.

Nzen 5y ago
I'm of the impression that it is an internet reimplemented on top of the internet that we are using right now. So, you download a vm emulator, like uxn [0]. This able to use a specific protocol to reach out and communicate with other vm emulators of its kind. But, like the tls namespace, my vm doesn't just reach out to macwrite.com/index.html . It has to go through my switch, through a series of switches of my and other commercial ISP datacenters, until it reaches the server that manages 'com' and then finds the server with the webpage I want. But, that requires people to forward that traffic with their own vm emulators. So, Tlon, the organization that sponsors the urbit ecosystem, sold address space for 'galaxies', which are like the top level domains. They are expected/encouraged to lease out address space to many others, as 'stars', who will relay traffic up and down. Finally, laggards are expected to rent address space and subscribe for bandwidth from the star operators as a 'planet'. A vm without a star, a comet, to, I don't know, sign its traffic, can not communicate with other vms on the network. That is what I've concluded urbit is. Urbit is sold as the opportunity to reimplement all of computing on top of this system. Like compilers ? They have a language they are building this stuff with. Like OS ? They need to flesh out the vm that you use. Like some application thing ? They probably need that too, reimplement all the things: text editor, web server, build system, and on and on. And you can be pretty sure that your work will be used, because it's a small community and they are apt to need your thing, and it can be a jewel that isn't carrying forty years of compatibility compromises [1] and exploration that was press ganged into production. [0] https://100r.co/site/uxn.html https://100r.co/site/uxn.html [1] http://perfectionkills.com/the-poor-misunderstood-innerText/ http://perfectionkills.com/the-poor-misunderstood-innerText/
- vzcx 5y ago
  You are somewhat wrong about how urbit works. Stars and galaxies don't really work as routers. They are more like DNS servers: they provide the peer discovery mechanism, translating from urbit IDs to public hosts and ports. Most communication is peer-to-peer. Software updates still flow down the tree from the root, but as I understand, they are looking to make that more flexible, though this poses some technical challenges. When you have an urbit planet, it's yours, and no star or galaxy can take it from you. There isn't a "lease" arrangement, it's bona-fide cryptographic ownership. Comets are currently served by the galaxies and can communicate with any other VMs that are willing to talk to comets, and at this stage in the network, that's basically all of them.

dwb 5y ago

I find the incredulousness around urbit's differences and ambition very tiresome. I have an urbit ship, I bought the identity when it was not so expensive. I've hardly used it; I'm not a pioneer sort of person and I've not found the time to get into Hoon. I'm not at all a true believer (to extend the cult comparison, which strikes me as unfair too); I think there are a few concerns you could raise (I agree on OTA updates and address space, and would add governance and power relations). But I for one welcome an ambitious re-thinking of (a subset of) computing and I wish them the best. I mean, run it in a VM or something and probably don't use it for anything sensitive right now. I want to live in a world where people have a go at unconventional things.

captainmuon 5y ago

The only good thing about Urbit are the Jorge Luis Borges references. Fun fact, the creator of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, is a far-right blogger with some pretty crazy ideas: http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ http://distributedweb.care/posts/who-owns-the-stars/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin > Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American far-right blogger. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right. From 2007 to 2014, he authored a blog called "Unqualified Reservations", which argued that American democracy is a failed experiment, and that it should be replaced by monarchy or corporate governance. He is known, along with fellow neo-reactionary Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. I find there are tendencies among some people in tech to bring upon what I would consider the crypto dystopia. Cryptocurrency is one such idea. Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. It enshrines a kind of cutthroat capitalism with the ruthlessness of an algorithm. (When it works as indended. Currently it's mostly used as a ponzi scheme or to buy drugs, but that's a different story.) An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc., but the culmination of this idea is certainly Urbit.

meowface 5y ago
>Like money, but every bit of democratic control and negotiability is removed. My understanding is that most cryptocurrencies intend to be extremely democratic. More democratic than all previously existing currencies, even. (Whether those ideas are feasible or those goals are being achieved is another matter.) I'm not sure where Yarvin stands on cryptocurrencies. He's indeed very anti-democracy and pro-monarchy, but that's exactly why I think the attempted connection doesn't work. I don't think it's fair or accurate to tie him or his ideology to the general concept of cryptocurrencies or their advocates. I'd wager the vast majority of advocates probably strongly disagree with him on most things. I think they would largely consider themselves democracy maximalists, even. Also, no need to add "fun fact"; Yarvin's involvement is by far the most well-known thing about this odd project. If you ask anyone what Urbit is, their answer is very likely either going to be "what?" or "that inscrutable thing that neo-reactionary blogger made". It usually takes up about 95%+ of any Urbit discussion anywhere online. >An immutable publication record and undeniable cryptographic identity is another idea which is dystopic to me. Why? Also, there are some cryptocurrencies that don't have either of those things. And for the ones that do, "cryptographic identity" just means "a public key", like a PGP key; not necessarily your real personal information. >In more benign form you find it in IPFS etc. Why the need for the equivocative qualifier? What's potentially unethical about the core idea of IPFS or those general categories of ideas? (Perhaps beyond the sorts of illicit activities any sort of decentralized technology, like Tor, can enable.) I'm not a big cryptocurrency supporter and recognize ~99.9% of it is Ponzi schemes and other varying degrees of hot air - and there are certainly a lot of highly pessimistic ideas I disagree with that are common among the community (e.g. that central banks are malevolent or that the US dollar is likely to collapse in the not-too-distant future) - but it's unfortunate how these things seem to always reduce to two radical poles that are pretty much equivalently ideologically closed-minded. (I'm certainly pulling a https://xkcd.com/774/ https://xkcd.com/774/, with zero qualms. I 100% agree with the character on the left, in this context.)

slakrems 5y ago

To me Urbit is a non starter because it was founded by Moldbug who is an incredible racist and they don’t hire people of color.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

If it's so bad, why is it so comfy? Maybe it's just because it's so much effort to get into it that it acts as a filter (like the old web) and the UI design is great.

lxe 5y ago

Finally, a human-readable explanation of Urbit!

ianbicking 5y ago

I actually think some of the underlying ideas Urbit is trying to pursue are interesting and have real potential: 1. Deterministic computing seems really interesting. It gives you something that is reliable and portable and replicable. It means you have to be very clear about everything that isn't deterministic, mostly I/O, and that's worth being clear about. I find determinism the more interesting part of pure functional programming, but I don't think you need a functional language to have deterministic computation. 2. Portable identity and communication are also interesting, they are necessary formal concepts if you are going to treat computation abstractly. 3. It's not crazy that you access this abstract concept of an OS using HTTP APIs and out-of-OS web frontends. It feels a little like smoke-and-mirrors since so much of what it "does" is actually the browser and JavaScript, but eh. That said, Urbit is a terrible expression of these ideas. The expression of computation (Nock) is absurd. Jets seem a little clever, but it's really an fragile extension of the idea of JITs, but based on idioms to make up for Nock being unable to express basic computational concepts (like negative numbers). As a result the Jets are essentially the Real Bytecodes. I guess it's a little like the evolution of CPU microcode, but entirely unnecessary as Nock as no legacy or advantages that need to be preserved. The language Hoon is the worst obscurantism I've ever seen. People will claim it's productive once you learn it, but I don't believe them one bit, the programs are long-winded, full of weird boilerplate, and just bad. They cover this up by making it seem that the programs _do_ something notable, but they don't. Most of the programs would be 100 lines in Node.js, they are just moving a little data around to rich (browser/JavaScript) clients. There's no decent abstractions for an OS. The whole concept of the Urbit machine is that it's one big opaque bundle of bytes. There's no documents. There's no applications. There's no separation of concerns. There's no consideration that a usable system requires lots of different parties (OS makers, application developers, API developers, cloud services, etc) coming together, and there's no sense that managing the complexity of that intersection is something an OS should do. There's no security. There's no permission model. There's no capability model. There's no firewalls between anything. It's like if you ran Python on bare metal and called it an OS. That said, I bet someone could do something really cool in this general area using WASM, contained in something that acted like an OS but wasn't much more complicated than an execution container.

severak_cz 5y ago

It reminds me LuaOS[1] - an distributed operating system written in lua communicating with users via XMPP. I wrote for it an "unix-like shell simulator"[2] (see [3] for example session log) and earned honorary title "early adopter". :D It was not really usable, mostly fantasy console running in another fantasy console, but I learned coroutines while working on it. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/pages/mobile-lua.php https://web.archive.org/web/20120503001002/http://luaos.net/... [2]: https://gist.github.com/severak/3927004 https://gist.github.com/severak/3927004 [3]: https://gist.github.com/severak/3927054 https://gist.github.com/severak/3927054

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vlmutolo 5y ago

> What that means at the time of writing2 is that it’s a single-threaded interpreter running as a unix process that speaks udp protocol to a meshed network (and http to your browser). I've looked up Urbit a couple times before, and this paragraph is the first time I ever even had an inkling of what it was.

deegles 5y ago

For those that are curious to try Urbit, you can boot a free identity called a comet in just a few minutes: https://urbit.org/getting-started/ https://urbit.org/getting-started/ Once you have it running, go to http://localhost:80 http://localhost:80 to use the web interface (Landscape). The Urbit Community group is the most active. Just hit "Join Group" the main page and enter "~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community"

hderms 5y ago
What do people commonly discuss on it?
- vzcx 5y ago
  On that group, they mostly discuss urbit. There are a lot of other interest groups with varying levels of activity: cat pictures, art, cryptocurrency, tech, emacs, politics, finance, ham radio, weightlifting, cars, tea... All the different kinds of stuff that people discuss on the web.
arthyn 5y ago
It'll get even easier on Thursday, check out https://github.com/arthyn/port https://github.com/arthyn/port for a preview.

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chrisallick 5y ago

you should rewrite "bit of history" => "urbit of history" can't let a pun like that go.

sneak 5y ago

Note that contributing to this ecosystem as a user or developer is likely to enrich the founder of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin, who despite having resigned his position with the company, likely retains equity in the company and valuable/scarce assets in the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race This is not a warning for or against, but it's always best to participate (if indeed you do) with eyes open.

anon_d 5y ago
We should encourage people to express dissenting views. The idea that we should do anything in our power to avoid good outcomes for someone that expressed ideas that we don't agree with is worse than hateful and evil: it's stupid and self-destructive.
- sneak 5y ago
  I do not think it is stupid nor self destructive to avoid enriching people who believe certain humans are more suited to being slaves than others, no. There is diversity of ideas and dissenting views, and he's free to blog about them, but I am also free to go work on other projects/communities that don't enrich landowners who I find morally repugnant. Not wishing to contribute work to directly financially enrich racists and segregationists is very different from thinking that they should be silenced.
  - creamytaco 5y ago
    Wikipedia is pretty biased and far from an arbiter of truth, especially when it comes to summarizing someone's life, beliefs and personality. A lot of what Yarvin has written is prescient and extremely incisive. Just because his views and models of the world do not align with the current cultural zeitgeist does not mean that he should be silenced or branded a racist. I get the feeling that most of the people that criticize him have not spent even 10 minutes reading him, but propagate regurgitations they've read/heard. This is not the mark of a healthy society.

OldGoodNewBad 5y ago

I find it odd that all the comments complaining about Yarvin’s non-leftist beliefs are still up here. We’ve had plenty of threads about things whose creators were raging Marxists and so on, if anybody complains that’s the end of your account here. His politics aren’t n Urbit so if you leftoids can keep your bile down it’d be greatly appreciated.

cropcirclbureau 5y ago

Anyone know other similar projects? (personal VMs in the cloud for everyone. Bonus points if it supports for deployment of dApps) The closest I've come across are: https://solidproject.org/ https://solidproject.org/ https://polypoly.coop/en-de/polypod https://polypoly.coop/en-de/polypod ...but these are purely data storage, they expect the processing to happen on other machines. Some powerful scalable server polling everyone's "data pod" to do what it does. Which is much more realistic and efficient than Urbit I suppose but it raises concerns about what the third party software running on somebody else's server's doing with your data. Running VMs for everyone sounds inefficient indeed. Urbit's opting to provide (what I assume to be) a lightweight OS/runtime for the apps that are accessing your data to run on is reasonable though it's still very much a single process for each single user at the least. Rolling your own OS/runtime allows you to make optimizations for this specific use-case but I don't know how far that'd take you. Maybe you can offload the processing to the client machine when it's available? If you're going to mostly be deploying distributed apps anyways...sounds like an engineering challenge though. Apps written for your platform will be facing interesting requirements (restraining most of it to bits that need to interact with the data stored in the "pod" helps but I suppose that's detail). But maybe the inefficiency's the toll we'll have to pay to get away from the centralization problem. I personally find the idea of running thousands of VMs used to deploy P2P apps in a data center painful. But maybe that's what we'll have to resort to until we have devices in everyone's pocket that we can reliably deploy P2P apps on. Besides the distributed chat/forum and social media, I bet you can replace the entire Google suite with this. After all, your Google account is in a sense, a way to access a VM in the cloud where you can run an assortment of apps on. How hard would it be to set up an Urbit clone using software existing today anyways? Top of my head, I can think WASM, WASI, libP2P, IPFS coming in handy.

arthyn 5y ago
No need to clone just come build on Urbit :)

textprotocol 5y ago

Urbit's Sigils can be aesthetically pleasing [1][2]. # sha3sum <<< 'textprotocol@github' | urbit | sigil | convert svg:- jpg:- | jp2a - [1] https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils/ https://urbit.org/blog/creating-sigils/ [2] https://github.com/textprotocol/sigil https://github.com/textprotocol/sigil