[olah_1]

>5. The urbit network is hierachically federated, and hence resistant to censorship.

This is not true. Urbit is essentially a proof-of-stake network where the Galaxies and Stars have the authority to ban anyone off the network that they want.

After Planets are already routed to some of their friends, they can keep those connections, but if a Planet is refused service by Stars, it will be limited in reach and capabilities.

The whole point is that there is accountability in the system and there does need to be a kind of Byzantine (literally it is set up like an empire) consensus.

If you're banned by one Star, you can still be served by another Star, but it does affect the reputation (not hard-coded, but actual) of the Star that serves unsavory Planets.

It's not far off from the Fediverse in this regard.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

I agree, I was being terse; it'd be more accurate to say you can be banned off of the urbit network entirely if everyone hates you, but if only most people hate you, you can still use it (but may only be able to talk to the other outcasts that most people hate).

[mmastrac]

Isn't this exactly the state of the internet today?

[hocwyn]

Not really? You could have thousands, hell millions of people who love your twitter account or your podcast but if a critical mass (not even a majority! just a large and sufficiently noisy minority) complain about you, you're gone.

On Urbit there are 65k tracker nodes and ~4B permanent peer nodes. So long as a single 1 out of those 65k is willing to sponsor you and broadcast your location anyone can find you and get packets from you, and even if the last 1 gets sick of you he's still just the equivalent of a torrent tracker: anyone who is already your peer will continue to see you on the network. It doesn't matter how many enemies you have or which corporations you piss off, you know? You're your own platform, once you install the software to share tweets or photos or interviews or whatever there is no one left between you and your audience to play gatekeeper.

[nohokum]

100% no.

On Urbit you have ~65,000 potential star sponsors and can switch at any time. (Worth noting: after a year and a half on the network, I have not heard of anyone being refused service by any star.)

That's a clear difference from today's internet, where effectively all discourse gets siphoned off, by a series of vicious megacorporation incentives -- the need to lock you in, the need to serve you up manipulative advertising -- onto the servers of one of four FAANG companies. (I think we can safely remove the N at this point, but then the acronym ends up looking rather seemly.)