[ineptech]

I agree that urbit has far outlasted all of the nay-sayers in a technical sense. People have been saying "this is some elaborate joke" for years, but the project has made steady progress and really is pretty usable now. It does what it says on the side of the tin, that's quite an achievement.

But, whatever its technical merits, do you think it can ever get to a point where it reached enough users to be useful (in the "chicken and egg problem" sense that platforms need a critical mass of users to be useful platforms), given the millstone around its neck? Do threads like this (where detailed, technical explanations get downvoted to oblivion, and "I heard Yarvin is racist" is the top comment) make you want to throw in the towel?

[jlehman]

It has enough users to be useful now, which number in the thousands. It's also not a service that anyone maintains on behalf of others, so there's no one that needs to have a critical mass for it to be useful. Nearly everyone running Urbit is self-hosting locally or on some VPS somewhere, and they can do that indefinitely even if no more code was ever pushed.

If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the people finding us, "I don't think about you at all" reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the tenor of conversation that happens here.

I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit) that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network if you want a planet or something to keep the conversation going.

[ineptech]

Oh, I've had a planet since 2016 or so I think, I boot it up once a year or so and check out the updates. I agree that the platform is big enough to be self-supporting in a technical sense. By "chicken and egg problem" I meant what is discussed here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii... I can use my planet to talk to the other weirdos who use urbit, but not a ton else yet - it won't really succeed as a platform until it has an ecosystem of developers making apps and users using them.

Is there some progress there btw? Last I checked there was no way to discover apps other than hard work, and sharing them (installing an app someone else had written) was pretty arduous.

edit: and I know HN isn't the whole world, but I suspect it is representative in this case. I just can't imagine any person learning anything about urbit from any source that doesn't get the 2-3 worst things Yarvin has ever written appended to it within the first hour. It's hard to imagine how it ever gets really popular under those circumstances.

[hocwyn]

This is what my company is building on Urbit: https://uqbarnetwork.medium.com/introducing-uqbar-network-6b...

Having a large audience of pre-existing users is nice (and ditto for dev ecosystem for tooling and libraries) but ultimately what makes Urbit a good idea is, as Josh says, that we want computers to primarily be doing one set of things and they were originally designed to do a different set of things (with the things they currently do added as a complicated afterthought). A blockchain protocol is in the end a p2p application. It benefits hugely from running on a natively p2p networked operating system with a built-in cryptographic identity infrastructure. If Urbit's technology works, people are going to build on top of it because they need it, and their customers will come to use what they've built because it works better. If the tech didn't work, it wouldn't matter how many people tried it.

You're correct that there is no "Urbit Store" analogous to the Apple Store or the Android Store (this is a feature not a bug for many users, although I sympathize with both perspectives). I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've published, you click the one you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.

[dmitriid]

> I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've published, you click the one you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.

First, you have to know the developer's name, and then find the apps that developer produced. This is literally the opposite of what most people do: search for an app (not for a developer) and install it (or search for an app category, and install an app)

[hocwyn]

If this were really a huge part of most people's experience of Urbit (that they want to search apps by name rather than by developer) then it would be important to know. My company would be happy to curate a list of All The Apps, if someone convinced me this was the case. Browsing big tech App Stores is a huge pain and most people just follow a link from the developer's web page in practice, but since there are so many fewer Urbit apps browsing a complete list could potentially be high-impact.

My worry would be that "and I wasn't able to find the name of anyone who develops apps!" is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway. In which case we'd have to put a certain amount of work into vetting all these apps and their updates and real users would still find apps the same way - clicking on links to apps their friends are recommending.

[dmitriid]

> If this were really a huge part of most people's experience of Urbit (that they want to search apps by name rather than by developer) then it would be important to know.

This is people's experience, period, not limited to Urbit.

> most people just follow a link from the developer's web page in practice

Or, rather from widely available lists of "10 best apps for X right now".

How do you expect anyone to find any apps in Urbit if there no sites to speak of and no lists of apps to speak of? Here was my experience trying Urbit out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124587

> is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway.

Yes, it's possible number #10 on a list of complaints, but they are not in 1-2-3-...-10 order. It's all of them together.

Put yourself into the shoes of a person starting with Urbit. Download Port. And then tell me what exactly the new user is to do? Suddenly "it's not a huge part of people's experience on Urbit" becomes "the biggest part and the biggest part #1" because there's literally nothing there.

[jlehman]

We shipped a proper mechanism for software distribution last October. If you haven't booted up since then you might want to. Discovery still requires word of mouth (but not for long...), but sharing them is now as simple as sharing a link in chat or punching something like the following into the Dojo.

|install ~dister-norsyr-torryn %canvas

edit: yes, there's an ecosystem of developers shipping software now. Here's a screenshot of my homescreen, which I cleaned up a couple of days ago to remove some apps I don't use often: https://imgur.com/7keFr7Y

Of the apps you can see, 13 were created by distinct developers. Some people are more prolific.