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by hodwik2 3648 days ago
Granted, I may not understand it at all, I only really started reading about it a few hours ago, but here it goes:

It's a decentralized internet, where your computer is the server, and it communicates directly with other computers by calling directly to their addresses.

As a result, e.g. your facebook data is stored on your computer, and other facebook users call your computer for posts.

Because the data is stored locally, and called through relatively universal APIs, any app can be written to call and display from those APIs, combine them, and let them inform each-other in any way you desire.

You can put your facebook in your reddit in your gmail.

That all runs inside a VM which ties your data to your address, so your identity (real or pseudonym) is singular, and uniform across all apps. This creates a real cost to ugly behavior, like spamming or trolling, as addresses are too limited to burn through willy-nilly.

Apps running on that VM are coded in a rather confusing functional language. Lots of people think he made it that confusing to stop newbs from writing for it.

I bought a star.

1 comments

It's a "decentralized" world wide web then. The internet is already decentralized and since you need the internet for Urbit to work let's stop calling it "the internet" anything.
You'll have to take that up with the public at large. We use "internet" to refer to the world wide web. Try to sell someone a computer that has "the internet", but won't do tcp/IP, you'll get punched.

As for the infrastructure, that's a rather more esoteric concern. It needs a distinguishing term.