Ask HN: What happened to Urbit?
It’s been a year since there was some meaningful update from them. Does anybody know if they are getting closer to their goal of giving every internet user their own server?
What is it that people find fascinating?
Urbit is a platform for building decentralized apps. That's it's entire goal: that everyone will be able to own all their own content instead of data being stuck in BookFace silos. To that end, it's a tightly-coupled environment that provides all the building block it needs to allow developers to easily build those apps, with the reasoning that building a decentralize app on Unix technology would never reached the point your mom could spin up a server by herself. Try to setup a GNU Social instance and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Most of the critisim that I've seen is pretty much the same "what a weird language", but imo that's pretty much just kneejerk from it not looking like C, and APL gets the same reaction (Hoon is probably objectively easier than APL since it's pretty much just Lisp-like under the hood, it just also looks weird.)
As for fascism, the creator is pretty notorious but that doesn't really touch any aspects that I've noticed. The identity hierarchy that people freak out about is basically just a clone of HTTPS certificate authorities, and the entire point of Urbit is removal of power from central servers, not give C. G. Yarvin absolute power of the internet or something.
How is this any different to just running your own site?
You can use urbit for a lot of stuff already, it's just kinda a hassle since it's still being developed and people haven't developed apps for it. Someone wrote a Tumblr mirror app a few weeks ago, for example, and there's a Twitter client too, but they're both not as easy to setup as is nessecary for wide support.
Take a good long look at the developer documentation and tell me I'm wrong.