[jlehman]

The problem of the technological cage posed by reliance on cloud services is one of the reasons Urbit is being developed. It's a personal server that operates on a P2P network. You own your own data, and your messages are encrypted. It feels like a cloud service, except you own it completely.

The project has been in the works for over a decade. It works, has an active community, and is making rapid strides in functionality and stability. I'd know, because I use it every day. Here's a good primer on what Urbit is looking to create: https://urbit.org/blog/urbit-is-for-communities/

Many seem to like to whine about Urbit and claim that it's creating a kind of digital feudalism. Perhaps they think that what we currently have isn't that. I have no interest in engaging with those old and tired arguments, which is why I originally ignored them and looked into it myself. If you also like to think for yourself, let me know and I'll bring you onto the network.

[EvanAnderson]

Urbit looks like some strange combination of rent seeking, land grab, and absurdist comedy. I keep waiting for the whole thing to come out as having been a joke.

[square_usual]

What do you mean? Why do you think it's "rent seeking, land grab, and absurdist comedy"?

[bitwize]

1) "We have to destroy it in order to save it" syndrome. Urbit's central thesis is "the internet is broken because Google and Facebook" but Google and Facebook didn't exploit flaws in the internet itself, just flaws in the incentive structure of our society.

2) Like Mencius Moldbug, Urbit is an intellectual shellgame Yarvin is playing to obfuscate what he's really up to. In Moldbug's case it's the return of kings as legitimate absolute rulers. For Urbit, it's getting people to sign on to being serfs in his digital kingdom.

[ghoward]

Urbit's system creates an elite: the galaxy owners. They will, of course, use their positions to seek rent and grab "land" (control over territory, where territory is just planets and the like).

[selfhoster11]

Somebody's got to own the resources, because they come from the physical world. That will be either power users who know enough about ownership, community groups, or commercial groups. Unless you have a fully distributed system with no centralised nodes, that's what you get.

[EvanAnderson]

Urbit doesn't seem to tie the ownership to physical scarcity of computing resources, though. They just invented some "land" to seek rents from, or sell to those who would seek rents. I'm all for spending money to bring physical computing resources to the system, including reselling access to those resources to others for profit, but the whole "stars / planets" false scarcity model ruins Urbit for me.

[ghoward]

I do hope a fully distributed system is possible. I have even tried to develop a design. https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-...

[bitwize]

And newLISP makes LISP fun again!