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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the private key to my original PGP key.

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.)

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> And I wouldn't say "nobody can ban you" [...] And the obvious end state is for a setup like Mastodon

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.

First off, I'm talking about the case where Mastodon instances collectively ban an instance, not a user. It's pretty easy to set up your own Mastodon instance, and in turn, norms and mechanisms have arisen for coordinated banning of instances with unwanted behavior.

Second, if you choose to keep your keys on a third-party service, then that third-party service can ban you.

This is a big part of the point of urbit: there is no difference between an instance and a user.

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.

Still not following how this is different from Mastodon. Some users run their own instance (= planet), which cannot be "banned" by ordinary Mastodon means; you can only refuse to peer with it. Some users have accounts on someone else's instance, which can be banned by the admin of the instance. If you start tooting, I dunno, reactionary pro-slavery nonsense that takes asymmetrically more effort to refute than to claim, there's pressure on the instance admin to ban you, and there's a means for unpeering the instance if they refuse o if you are the instance admin. Sure, this isn't protocol-wide, and you can find your own reactionary buddies and whine about how you'd be treated more fairly under monarchism if you want, but you're cut off from large parts of the network. What's different about the outcome under Urbit?

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.

To make a real life analogy,

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

I don't think that is correct, there are plenty of Mastodon instances with a very low number of users (1-5 users).

I already spelled out the difference, and even highlighted it in the hope that people would notice, but I don't mind doing it one more time: in urbit, there is no difference between an instance and a user.

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.

First off, you're wrong about Urbit - Urbit explicitly does not have the address space to give each human their own planet, believing that it's a political ideal that not all humans deserve the same rights. (It might be true that each human currently using Urbit does have their own planet, but the stated long-term goal of Urbit is for this not to be the case.)

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.

I still don't really understand the difference, is it not possible to host a service on your planet, and then have people make accounts on it and log into it with some other means? If so, that would seem to make it identical to mastodon, or any other internet service really. There doesn't seem to be any reason you can't bridge it with random HTTP services. I mean, in theory you could even run a mastodon-like service inside a planet?

> Have you never lost a private key? I definitely lost the private key to my original PGP key.

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.

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