| HN Mirror

Your submarine "needs" ~zod to be found by anyone because:

   try=> ->-<
   ... (your submarine)
   try=> (sein ->-<)
   ~zod

... ~zod is your parent ship. Without him, you simply have no forwarding address.

If your batz wizardry is sufficient and ~zod is not there (both of these are things that we are not counting on being true when you run Urbit for the first time) you will still get the same result in your terminal, you can reach out and contact other carriers and their friends, even without ~zod. They just can't find you. And you need to find another way to bootstrap your clay (filesystem) if you care about having local clay.

Think about the difficulty of coordinating multiple stakeholders, compared to the ease of explaining the "benevolent dictator" model that most of computing is really based on today. If the only thing that ~zod needs to do is point submarines at one another and facilitate the existence of other signing ships under his domain, that's very easy. Doing those things without ~zod's cooperation will require some further thought and more explanation.

I am a carrier owner (~del) and I count on ~zod to make it easy for new subs to find me. It's very convenient this way. But, anyone who knows how to type:

   :~del/main=/bin/hi ~dalnel

... can also reach out to my carrier and run "hi" (become mmy neighbor) to find ~dalnel with my help, and exchange keys with him (~dalnel is the cruiser, like ~zod's ~doznec).

~zod never needs to get involved. There is, however, no magic under the hood. My carrier ~del works exactly the same way, except he is not preferred in the same way by the submarine client implementation.