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For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just recently distributed: https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20s... My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're at the very tail end of low-hanging fruit in regards how easy the next generation of software innovation will be to explain to "your average layperson". The problems that decentralization are trying to solve are uniquely understood by developers, particularly people well-versed in the metagame of content, advertising, identity, and privacy on the web, which is a vast field filled with thousands of great reasons to consider decentralization, but are unfortunately hard to distill down into a 30-second elevator soundbyte. Another problem is that having high-density conversations about software innovation is fundamentally absurd. Every software innovation is ultimately just "another way to write code", so you can boil down everything Urbit and IPFS and Ethereum are doing to "well, our current code for everything is this way, and it seems to suck, so we're going to try writing the code a completely new way". That's it. Every time someone asks "what can you even do with this thing?", the answer is "well, you can develop software on it". Edit: Apparently the original article has been un-paywalled. Perhaps you can access it here: https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-f... |
This essay sums it up nicely, so I won't repeat it. But I very much identify with, and am personally vexed by, the disorganized, Balkinized, online world we citizens of the "first world" are being forced to navigate.
One idea I don't grasp is how an Urbit server might integrate with a service like Facebook. Let's say you could set up your Urbit server to integrate your social news feeds from different services.
Would this violate the terms of service of a system like Facebook?
One could hypothetically create an application that at least would handle submission of personal content to any social network. And it could thereby keep a local copy of the content. But it would have to scrape the site, or use the provided API, to present any response to posts.
The linked article mentions that Facebook sued a company that tried to market an app that would present an integrated social news stream from FB and Twitter. I wonder how they would respond to an app that would let a user setup their own system to do the same thing?
I find the increasing power of the big tech companies disturbing, though I do appreciate the services they provide.