[chc4]

Do you have something in mind? Using GNU Social as a convient whipping-post, it's built on PHP and MySQL and Salmon and PubSubHubbub and...

The point of Urbit is to be a cobherent, self-contained platform. Every other decentralized app I've seen had to reinvent several wheels and can't interact with each other because of it.

Urbit has a typed versioned filesystem exposed as a global namespace, typed RPC with a diff/patch system, an identitt system, forces apps (and the e tire platform) to be purely functional for easy saving and crash tolerance, and other fun things. It's like shitty OSX - it has a /vision/, even if some parts don't make sense.

[tptacek]

The problem I think a lot of people have with this system is that they agree with you: the underlying concept of an overlay network with abstracted addressing and an embedded programming language VM is straightforward, and may indeed be useful. Since all the core technological ideas in this system are simple enough to be undergraduate projects, why not just wait until someone builds one out of conventional components?

You get the irony of complaining about how every competing design has had to "reinvent several wheels", right? The system you're advocating reinvented ASCII.

[chc4]

My dude, how can you read code out loud and not understand the draw of having single-syllabul names for all the weird characters in ASCII. I don't have many of them, but this is a hill I will die on even if Urbit falls off the internet tomorrow. Luckily, you don't /actually/ have to memorize those. They aren't used if you aren't saying runes out loud.

There's a difference between reinventing ten wheels ten different ways for ten apps, and reinventing one really big wheel. It has to be self-contained enough that other apps can use it without having to roll their own anything, so all of them has the same API.

One of the problems with "just use a different P2P VM" is that it probably wouldn't solve the problem of having a server your mother could use. You'd probably still have to install and setup Apache and MySQL and ElasticSearch and whatever, even if someone implements the perfect transport protocol and platform. For Urbit you just run it, which can be hidden behind a pretty "click to start" button that pings our to AWS. Hence, one big wheel.

If you do see an Urbit-like project that has the same goals, I would be ecstatic to hear about it though. I've basically had "urbit but different" on my TODO list since I first saw about it.

[munin]

I think urbit started out as a pomo critique of modern academia and tech, with heavy jargon and wheel rebuilding. Then, some other people started taking it seriously. I’m not sure if that is the best or worst outcome for this kind of joke.

[jolux]

Moldbug hates pomo though. Pretty sure the dude doesn't read anything that was written after the year 1900.

[munin]

Don't you know, the Moldbug persona is separate from the persona that develops Urbit!

[jolux]

What the heck is that supposed to mean? "Persona?" Fine, Curtis Yarvin has said that he only reads old books.

[munin]

It was a joke, when Curtis was dis-invited from speaking at a conference due to writings he made as Moldbug, the argument he made was that the Moldbug persona and the Urbit developer Curtis Yarvin are separate so there was no problem or worry about Curtis saying wacky racist things during his presentation about Urbit, because the person that says wacky racist things was Moldbug, who was not invited, therefore would not be coming.

[Karunamon]

Sorry, Pomo? Can’t get a good definition via the googles.

[grzm]

Post modernism

[jacobush]

That is so pomo.

[wmf]

Coherent, self-contained platforms seem to always lose in the market, so it's not even clear that's a good goal to aim for. That's why I prefer Sandstorm; it provides an evolutionary path from normal Linux.

Getting back to your question, Blockstack is claiming to provide virtually the same personal cloud features as Urbit but it's only boiling half the ocean.