[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.