I hope one day saner apps will adopt similar concepts, or reuse the urbit identity layer for identity purposes
I hope one day saner apps will adopt similar concepts, or reuse the urbit identity layer for identity purposes
And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" - quite the opposite, in fact: with Urbit every major network node gets to make its own choice about banning, and the system encourages that. And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon (or, frankly, Twitter blocks) where nodes collaborate on identifying spammers, griefers, and other bad actors because nobody wants to do full-time moderation work for their own personal experience on the network. That means your permanent identity can easily be banned across large swaths of the network.
(I think that's actually totally fine, I just don't think it's true to say that nobody can ban you.)
For nearly twenty years now, PGP tutorials have often explained the importance of printing out a copy of your private key in a special OCR-readable font, and putting that in a safe place. Then you won't risk losing your private key even if all the devices it was stored on perish.
It is indeed quite similar to mastodon in the sense that other instances can ban you. The difference is that in mastodon your identity is usually located on an instance, and if that instance bans you, you lose your identity. In Urbit every identity has its own instance so your personal contact list will still be able to reach you.
Of course requiring everybody to run its own instance adds quite some friction for user onboarding, but that is an issue with the urbit network, not with the identity layer. You could imagine having your identity and linking it to a hosted instance, and later switch instance if the needs arise.
This is what I like about the idea of having your identity as a NFT, but clearly the way urbit currently uses it does not exploit the full potential of the idea.
As for losing your keys, if such a system would become widespread, most people would chose to have their keys hosted on a third party service, and only people who really care about maintaining full ownership would keep the keys to themselves.
Second, if you choose to keep your keys on a third-party service, then that third-party service can ban you.
If a star or galaxy wants to refuse to route to a planet, they can. A planet can then look for another star or galaxy which will route packets for them.
Also, if a planet ends up on another planet's personal banlist, that's it: the identities are durable and immutable, no amount of moving around will evade the ban. The annoying user has to either buy a new planet or make a comet.
It remains to be tried at scale, but urbit was carefully designed to solve some of the problems Curtis encountered with Usenet, back at the dawn of time. It might work, we'll see.
And if it is different, I don't know that a system that is carefully designed to solve the "problems" of someone who generally should be banned for good reason is what most of is want.
In mastodon, people all live in big collectivist housings centered around a project, If you get kicked out you become homeless, or you need to start your own collective, where you will be initially alone
In urbit, people all live in individual houses, where they can invite friends over. People can ban you from their house, but you can't get kicked out of your own house
If everyone in Mastodon ran an instance with exactly one user, then sure, it would be possible to ban a user, but not strip the database of all their posts and take their identity away, because both of those things are under the instances control.
But Mastodon doesn't work that way, and urbit does.
But even if you were right about Urbit, it wouldn't change my claim. I understand your claim. I am not trying to claim that Mastodon is just like Urbit. My point is that sometimes, in Mastodon, there is no difference between an instance and a user, just like you claim about Urbit. Yes, sometimes, there is, but Mastodon's norms had to figure out how to handle the case where there is no difference, because that case exists. And yes, when people collectively refuse to peer with an instance, the user(s) on that instance are not stripped of their posts and do not have their identity taken away, because those things are under the Mastodon instance's control... but it would be pretty misleading to say "If you set up your own Mastodon, you can't get banned."
And there's no reason to expect that Urbit, if it grows to the level of popularity as Mastodon, won't develop analogous norms.
My experience with spam [1] is that 90% of the non-trivially-filtered-kind comes from either taken over 'mainstream' email provider accounts (eg. gmail, yahoo, ...) or from exploited websites that can send email (eg. a wordpress or prestashop instance). Obviously dedicated 'spam' domains tend to get blocked _very_ fast on a multitutde of RBLs. It's the domains shared between spam and non-spam users that are the real problem.
Making domains more expensive probably won't help fighting spam. It will, however, increase the barrier to having an online identity to people who can't blow a couple months' rent on an urbit identity.
On the other hand, being able to register domain names without _any_ identity checks and oversight from legally responsible registrar entities could possibly increase abuse in some other ways.
[1] - I help run a mail server for a hackerspace.