I'm biased because I now work on it, but I think Urbit is the only way something like this will work for most people and at scale. "Only" is probably too strong

I'm biased because I now work on it, but I think Urbit is the only way something like this will work for most people and at scale. "Only" is probably too strongly worded, but it's the one attempt I've seen where I think real success is among one of the possible outcomes (other attempts I've seen don't fix deeper issues and are DOA). The issues that caused the decentralized web to fail (and incentivize centralization) are deeper and to get self-hosting to work beyond the tiniest of niches requires rethinking some of the computing constraints we find ourselves operating under from first principles. People will never run their own servers if that means administering linux. Identity will never be solved by PGP key signing parties and spam will always be a problem on the current web. Federated systems in their current state that require everyone to run linux servers and keep them in sync/up to date will not work. https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr... https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit On the current web we're just serfs allowed account access on company servers. I think it's admirable to make it easier to run your own server, but I think decades have shown that it won't work (beyond a narrow hyper-technical niche) without fixing some of the larger issues: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook... - the most exciting part of the web was what people thought it would bring in the 90s. I think that isn't impossible, but we're currently trapped in a local max. We can't get out of that local max without acknowledging why we're in it - why the centralized services are currently so much better and why the dream of everyone self-hosting (even with decades of effort) has been a failure.