[hault]

urbit dev here: we completely agree that we need to have useful apps on top of it. We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting (in fact, the urbit.org site uses it!). All you have to do is drop a few md files into a tree and you're ready to go. See http://urbit.org/docs/using/web/

Joey Krug, founder of Augur, had a great post on how he could see Urbit as being a great compliment to the blockchain[0]:

"If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists, Urbit has the potential to be useful for essentially everything else.

To give a concrete example, this would be useful for any Ethereum app that doesn't want to store data on a central server (which most cannot do whether for legal, security, or ideological reasons). The idea to me is that the internet wasn't built very well to run decentralized apps [which is definitely the case if you've ever tried building one without having to rely on central servers for caching, storing accounts, comments, etc.]. It's, imo, a nice complement to blockchain tech like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Long term once it's out and running I see dapps like Augur [a decentralized prediction market which I work on - http://augur.net] using it so users can securely store their private keys, report data, market data, trade history, etc. and easily go across/between devices as opposed to just using localstorage [which is a pain to migrate using] or fetching it from ethereum every time [which is very time consuming and has lots of overhead].

If we're going to seriously move in this direction of decentralization, at scale we need something like urbit. No one else is really tackling the same set of problems. Came across this quote on it by Alan Kay: "They have verve, and that's generally a good thing. In this case there are a lot of details that need to be grokked to make any reasonable comment. The use of combinators (a kind of dual of lambda calculus) harks back to an excellent thesis by Denis Seror at the University of Utah in the 70s that produced a safe, highly scalable and parallel implementation. I haven't looked at it more deeply (and probably should)." [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177] - very cool!"

And finally, another idea: https://urbit.org/posts/objections/#killer

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817721

[lisper]

> We have an alpha for super simple wordpress-like hosting

And what is the advantage of this over wordpress? Or even just raw nginx?

I don't necessarily mean what is the advantage of urbit in its current state -- I get that this is an alpha release. What I'm asking is: when urbit becomes what you envision it to be, what tangible advantage should I as a user expect to see from using Urbit over using Wordpress or nginx?

[throwanem]

The combination of personal ownership of data, worldwide visibility (if you want it), and iPhone/Facebook-tier ease of use.

Right now, you can only have two of those at a time. You own your Wordpress install and it's world visible, but your mom needs you to administer it. (Not every mom is lucky enough to have a kid like you.) Your Facebook is world visible and your mom can set one up, but you don't own it (quite the converse). You own what's on your iPhone and your mom can use one, but you can't publish anything with it - you need a separate service with its own set of tradeoffs.

Urbit's USP is that it's designed to be able to provide all three, along with a cryptographically verifiable identity system that can make spamming and shitposting costly enough to be economically inviable.

All this is ambitious as hell, of course, and it's very early days yet - there's every chance Urbit will go down in history as a curious but ultimately doomed also-ran, if it goes down in history at all. But it's easy to understand why people find its design goals appealing.

[lisper]

> The combination of personal ownership of data, worldwide visibility (if you want it), and iPhone/Facebook-tier ease of use.

OK, I am totally down with that set of goals. But...

> You own your Wordpress install and it's world visible, but your mom needs you to administer it.

That's not clear. Have you ever actually used Wordpress? It's actually pretty friendly to non-technical users. But OK, let's accept as a premise that Wordpress is beyond Mom's ability, and that this is a problem that needs to be solved. There are two possible ways to solve it:

1. Modify Wordpress to make it more mom-friendly

2. Throw out everything that has been done in computing to date and start from scratch, rebuilding everything from the ground up (well, except that we're still going to run on unix and hand-compile Hoon to C when performance matters, but we'll let that slide).

Why is approach #1 so unlikely to succeed that we should even try #2?

[throwanem]

> It's actually pretty friendly to non-technical users.

To use, sure. To install and administer? Not so much. You can get a Wordpress.com account, but that doesn't solve the ownership problem.

Sandstorm.io goes some way toward fixing the specific problem of Wordpress being impossible for non-technical users to install and administer. (Probably quite a long way, in fact.)

And that's great! For Wordpress. But it doesn't do anything to solve the larger problem of ownership of data, which - and I appreciate I didn't make it clear in the comment to which you're responding, but see [1] - is in this case a cipher for ownership of identity, which right now belongs to social media networks, which is another way of saying it belongs to Facebook.

It's not clear that something like Urbit is necessary to solve this problem. But it's also not clear that something like Urbit is not necessary, and I don't know of anyone else who's even trying to attack the problem directly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007854

[lisper]

> To install and administer? Not so much.

I ask again: have you ever tried? Because installing WP can be as easy as:

sudo apt-get install wordpress

after which all the admin is done through a web interface.

> I don't know of anyone else who's even trying to attack the problem directly.

https://owncloud.org

https://mailinabox.email

https://github.com/rongarret/BWFP

[throwanem]

Not for people already comfortable with VPSes and firewalls and SSH keys and command lines and apt-get. For everyone.

And that matters, because as I learned the hard way, being able to do it just for yourself isn't enough. A social network is social. If you're not on it and everyone else is, you still lose.

[Animats]

The Ethereum crowd is a good marketing target. They love unique jargon and excessive complexity.

(Although tying your fate to Etherium may be a mistake. The contract technology turned out to be insecure, and very hard to secure. Etherium needs to go back into the shop for a major redesign.)

[davidgerard]

> If the blockchain is useful in those areas where [almost] no trust exists,

It is entirely unclear this has been demonstrated. Mostly what we see in the cryptocurrency space in practice (not hypotheticals) is scams upon scams: it turns out that a "trustless" system attracts people who can't be trusted.

[nikolay]

What's "decentralized" in your case, we're curious? How are you any better than the free Keybase.io?