[hn_urbit_thr123]

It's disappointing how much low-effort bashing there is in this whole thread. Sure urbit is weird and has a lot of baggage and questionable design decisions, but the project we're discussing is explicitly an attempt to separate out a few good ideas and remove the bad parts. Is that really deserving of casual mockery?

I know I'm shouting into the void here, and under a pseudonym to boot, but this is an active FOSS project that real live people work on in their spare time because they hope it'll be important and useful. I like to think it's a convention here not to shit on such people for comedy value.

[pavlov]

Do they work on it because they hope it will be useful, or because they hope their crypto-fiefdom will be valuable and make them rich?

Behind the impenetrable jargon, Urbit has always put a lot of emphasis on this "digital real estate" aspect. For example:

"Urbit IDs are property, and we think of the entire registry of Urbit IDs as a vast territory of digital land." [https://urbit.org/overview/urbit-id]

It's not exactly an altruistic open source project if your fundamental motivation is to become a member of the digital landowner upper class.

(And if you scratch the surface of Urbit, you'll find the creator is a reactionary extremist who has said he prefers feudalism to democracy. Those ideas are embedded in the platform design that makes lip service to decentralization but actually concentrates control to the very few.)

[flir]

Disconnected thoughts (having just spent a couple of hours of fascinated reading around Urbit).

Thirty years ago I would have been on this train. No question. It's giving me early 90s internet optimism techno-utopia feels. Now I'm older and a lot more jaded, I think I'll give it a miss and set my sights lower with something like Gemini for my weird niche internet protocol needs.

The deliberately impenetrable jargon reminds me of 90s-era Wired's reader-hostile graphic design. We're so cool, we can put barriers in your way and you'll clamber over them to get to us. That's a marketing technique - I've heard it called challenge appeal.

All federated solutions need some kind of trust model. Money is not, at first glance, a terrible answer to that problem (hashcash for email, and some web forums charge a few dollars for accounts just to keep the spammers out). Mastodon delegates trust to the instance admin, Scuttlebutt limits its web of trust to two degrees. But this elaborate tiered model is just unnecessary - they must have considered, and rejected, proof of work or many other possible solutions. It's sad that I assume bad faith because of someone's political position, but so it goes on the post-enshitiffication internet. The trust has already been eroded.

Isn't it interesting that a piece of software can be the concrete embodiment of a philosophy?

[woah]

Urbit made the choice to use a bunch of silly new words for familiar concepts, not because they were inventing something so new that there were no words to describe it, but because they wanted to fool people into thinking that's what they were doing. Actually they just spent 10 years trying to do https://sandstorm.io/, but made it 10 times harder than it needed to be by coming up with a wacky new set of programming languages with silly names for everything.

That's funny, and it is OK to make fun of it.

[fodkodrasz]

> Is that really deserving of casual mockery?

Probably, as they were asking for it by doing their work in cultish style. If you want to change the world, you need people to accept the change you want to bring, and for that you must make it understandable, approachable for them.

Why would I need to put a lot of effort to be able to be part of a discussion which is seemingly not intended for me? If the ideas behind it prove to be useful, they will eventually resurface/be done by a more welcoming/industry standard way. Then it will be worth the effort. Until then if I want to waste my time on esoteric nonsense I go look at the Woynich Manuscript or read schizo larp on /x/. (Or just try to keep up with the SV JS scene where everything is reinvedted ignoring every industry standard ligo and is named crazily)

> this is an active FOSS project that real live people work on in their spare time because they hope it'll be important and useful.

So what? There are lots of other project done on the same basis, and for most of them you don't have to learn a new dialect just to understand what their work is about.

[xixixao]

Parent is perhaps comedic but has a valuable point: This writeup is unapproachable for a general audience due to heavy use of meaningless (“brand”) names.

For me it’s also a red flag: Neither system seems to be designed to be approachable. One or two brand names are OK, but these systems seem to use them way too liberally.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

If you decided to make a fork of linux, and wrote an article explaining why, would you expect it to be easily comprehensible to someone who's never used linux?

[Nursie]

I'd expect someone that worked on the BSD kernel or SunOS or whatever else to be able to read about your linux fork and come away with a certain level of understanding as to what sort of thing you hoped to achieve vs what's in the existing mainline kernel. People with some kernel theory under their belt, that sort of stuff.

They may not grasp every little thing, but they would be likely to get an understanding.

But the use of deliberately weird terms for things makes it less possible for those who likely have overlapping domain knowledge to understand these systems or posts about them.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

The problem isn't that you're wrong, it's that this is the same cutting insight everyone has in their first five minutes of exposure to urbit. It's like going to Australia and telling everyone you meet that vegemite probably won't take off in America because it tastes weird. We know, man.

But there's also probably some new and interesting criticisms one could make? Perhaps about the actual project described in the article? And maybe after having read it and understand it? That doesn't seem like too high a standard.

[Nursie]

If it wasn’t intentionally obfuscated, and used more standard, accessible terms, perhaps that might happen more frequently.

The fact is that’s a major red flag.

Also I’m not sure you get to claim boredom with the answer to a question you directly asked.

[hn_urbit_thr123]

I'm not bored, just sad. The "personal server" thing is a cool idea. I think the world would be better if it existed and worked well enough for wide adoption, but it seems like it'll never happen because the first guy to try to build one was a weird racist. So sorry to rag on you for something literally every other commenter in this thread is doing, it's just dispiriting to see, over and over.

[theamk]

yes. I've read some of low-level technical VAX/VMS and Solaris articles, and they were mostly comprehensible. Connection Machine stuff is impractical but _fascinating_ (despite being much farther from Linux than Urbit ever was)

Urbit is really an outlier, with jargon/innovation fraction far exceeding anything else I have seen.

[mplewis]

Urbit is a weird freak system built to be intentionally hard to use by a bunch of actual fascists whose goal is to become the new landlords of an imaginary digital real estate economy. Yes, it deserves all the ridicule you can give it and more.