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Comment by taylorlapeyre | Hacker News Reader

My money is on urbit becoming a haven for these people. If you're constantly getting de-platformed, Urbit has a lot going for you. Decentralized, unregulated, unmoderated chat that’s hard to get into and fully anonymous, with a "burn it down" attitude throughout. I've been in there, they already welcome similar types. Symbolic imagery in the form of "sigils" already is a way to show support for certain concepts/places/people in a highly reproducible but obscure way. It really feels like it's only a matter of time.

You're already seeing it with tweets like this from within the community: https://twitter.com/default_friend/status/134769644628863386...

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The only things that take off are those that are beyond easy technically for the end user. Thats why this will never work at least in mass.

I agree that this is the one thing I'm unsure about. But: a lot of people once said this same argument about cryptocurrency and were amazed at how technically literate drug dealers could actually be, given the right incentives.

Regardless, as of recently they are making everything a one-click process: https://tlon.io

Extremely obscure dark corners of the web have always existed. They're not novel, and in general they have not been particularly dangerous as their niche is extremely small.

I hope you're right.

When I was 10 I could already find The Anarchists' Cookbook on newsgroups trivially. Back then it was trivial to find thoroughly illegal porn, racist forums, and all sorts of things that never decanted into the current state of affairs.

Crypto only got popular when it became easy. Before Coinbase and some others nobody outside of the nerds or darkweb was talking about crypto. Even now most people don’t understand it even though they’ve heard of it.

One side effect is that these technologies very quickly only become used by the people who really need it. Crypto in general has a huge stigma of being used by drug dealers, money launderers, and the like.

Urbit looks gimicky. Maybe something you can buy an SD card for a Raspberry Pi for or something simple enough would be far more likely to become popular, especially if you sell a ready to run setup. Imagine more people running their own Fediverse instances.

I don't disagree, but for what it's worth, they are recently making it a lot easier to get on: https://tlon.io

The example on the page "Art Discussion" is so cringe.

They know exactly what kind of crowd free speech first platforms draws. And it most definitely isn't someone discussing the Q3 results of their art gallery or the merits of Hoffmann's art style.

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