[gonehome]

Overlay OS is a strategy (worked well for the web), long term it'd be nice to run directly on the metal but that's obviously a ways off.

You can have simplicity with the proper abstractions and design to get there over time then you can fix it bit by bit. This is the only way a massive rewrite of the stack like this has any hope of success.

Mastodon is mostly a twitter clone - with a lot of effort you could probably tie server creation to eth IDs and resolve that bit at least (make it easier to spin up servers), but you don't solve the issue with updating servers to match versions and the fall out from all of that other stuff. You also don't solve application creation or distribution. Urbit's OS is designed as a deterministic function of its inputs - this is necessary to make it trivial to run/update the nodes. It's more than there being no distinction between users and nodes (though that's a big part).

I'd bet against any other federated system long term. Urbit is still a long shot, but if it wins - it wins big.