
Ask HN: What happened to Urbit? - smikhanov
It’s been a year since there was some meaningful update from them. Does anybody know if they are getting closer to their goal of giving every internet user their own server?
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Johnny_Brahms
A question about urbit: whenever I read anything concerning it, all I see is a
weird programming language and warning signs of esoteric technocratic fascism.

What is it that people find fascinating?

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chc4
(I own an Urbit Galaxy, so /very/ biased source.)

Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. That's it's entire goal:
that everyone will be able to own all their own content instead of data being
stuck in BookFace silos. To that end, it's a tightly-coupled environment that
provides all the building block it needs to allow developers to easily build
those apps, with the reasoning that building a decentralize app on Unix
technology would never reached the point your mom could spin up a server by
herself. Try to setup a GNU Social instance and you'll know what I'm talking
about.

Most of the critisim that I've seen is pretty much the same "what a weird
language", but imo that's pretty much just kneejerk from it not looking like
C, and APL gets the same reaction (Hoon is probably objectively easier than
APL since it's pretty much just Lisp-like under the hood, it just also looks
weird.)

As for fascism, the creator is pretty notorious but that doesn't really touch
any aspects that I've noticed. The identity hierarchy that people freak out
about is basically just a clone of HTTPS certificate authorities, and the
entire point of Urbit is removal of power from central servers, not give C. G.
Yarvin absolute power of the internet or something.

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atroyn
> That's it's entire goal: that everyone will be able to own all their own
> content instead of data being stuck in BookFace silos.

How is this any different to just running your own site?

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wmf
They've had several blog posts in the last year. It's a long-term project so I
would't be surprised if progress is slow.

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chc4
There's a public forum for urbit that you can check if you want more active
discussion on the community (urbit.org/fora), along with the urbit-meta talk
room which all the developers and users chat in constantly.

You can use urbit for a lot of stuff already, it's just kinda a hassle since
it's still being developed and people haven't developed apps for it. Someone
wrote a Tumblr mirror app a few weeks ago, for example, and there's a Twitter
client too, but they're both not as easy to setup as is nessecary for wide
support.

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tree_of_item
Urbit is snake oil. They're never going to deliver anything. That sale of
"stars" or whatever was them cashing out.

Take a good long look at the developer documentation and tell me I'm wrong.

