| So we started from this ideal picture of urbit: > Urbit is the server-app-container thing that would make my non-techy Mom want to pay $5/mo for a hosted server instance. > Want to see what Bill Smith is up to? finger bsmith. Want to argue about politics? talk.politics. God, how simple things were! > Urbit is designed to be essentially impervious to malware. ... and we ended up with: > but one presumes that if you host an urbit on EC2, you'd also be putting cloudflare in front of its webserver > If you did write an app that defaulted to "accept messages from anyone" then you'd need to include some sort of "report spam" feature in it I suppose, > "Your hosting provider might not do a good job of managing backups" is a) well outside of urbit's purview, > So of course you need to keep your login and password safe, and the host OS needs to be secure, and so forth. So what are then advantages of urbit over, say, wordpress install with some plugins? So far I have heard: - Universal identity system for other urbit users - Automatic application update - Some subset of security bugs has been eliminated - Simple application installation Wordpress (with plugins): - Has OAUTH and facebook/g+ auth plugins - Has auto-update functionality - Written in PHP, which entirely eliminated at least buffer overflow bugs and concurrency bugs from the user-written code. - I can find EC2 images with wordpress already installed -- just create a machine based on them and you are all set! And wordpress provides somewhat easy interface to install new plugins! And apparently neither Urbit nor wordpress take care of the hard stuff: - How to set up backups and make sure they will not fail 6 month in (and no, most hosting providers will not do this automatically for you) - How to prevent malware on your personal computer from destroying all your digital life - How to prevent SPAM while still allowing messages from people you did not know before - How to monitor the server and fix it (restart?) when it fails - How to select the hosting plans to optimize cost for the resources you want to use Now, you may say that urbit does [will do] much more that wordpress, but so far you have not mentioned anything like that. Your original comment mentioned: mail server, minecraft server, and apps that "let you upload a file to the cloud and they let your friends access it". Wordpress does the last one, and from I understand, urbit will not be that great for the first two ones. So it does not make sysadmin's life much easier, nor does it give you some killer features you cannot find anywhere. What's the point then? |
Look, if you're a hacker, and you've got some time to kill, just download it and run it and spend an evening with the "Getting started" doc and writing a little bit of hoon. You'll figure out what it is and what it might be a lot faster than by asking questions on a forum. And if you're not, ignore it, it is nowhere near being useful for end users yet.