I like the idea of having a node I can just plug into my network. I run my Urbit on a Mac mini with tailscale (which works great).
The core of what he writes about is correct though, email failed to be truly peer to peer (as imo all non-urbit-like federated systems will) because of the incentives that lead to centralization (spam, difficulty of running nodes, etc.)
We’re suffering the consequences of the local max we’re trapped in currently because of this. The promise of the 90s internet was a bunch of people using decentralized services they controlled - instead we're primarily thin clients connecting to a small handful of powerful ad companies. We're mostly serfs [0] allowed access if we give up our data for ad targeting, follow EULAs nobody reads, and don't say anything the company earls disagrees with.
I like the idea of having a node I can just plug into my network. I run my Urbit on a Mac mini with tailscale (which works great).
The core of what he writes about is correct though, email failed to be truly peer to peer (as imo all non-urbit-like federated systems will) because of the incentives that lead to centralization (spam, difficulty of running nodes, etc.)
We’re suffering the consequences of the local max we’re trapped in currently because of this. The promise of the 90s internet was a bunch of people using decentralized services they controlled - instead we're primarily thin clients connecting to a small handful of powerful ad companies. We're mostly serfs [0] allowed access if we give up our data for ad targeting, follow EULAs nobody reads, and don't say anything the company earls disagrees with.
[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...