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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

I think you don’t, which is why I think federated systems built on the existing stack are doomed to fail (by recentralizing). You’re right to point out email as an example of this failure.

You need urbit or something like it to fix it, the problems are deeper.

https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/tlon-urbit-computing...

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I am continually impressed by how much more relevant Urbit has become (contrary to people years ago arguing it would fade out into irrelevancy). Urbit was designed holistically to solve the problems the "web 2" internet experienced in a structural way, not just apply some fancy "web 3" bandaids to some them. So of course it is a lofty project. But time and again it's proven that it took the right stance on socio-technological issues. Will it ever gain enough traction so that it replaces your text message app? Well that's really a social question, and one can wish. But it certainly solves all the problems people keep bumbling into when trying to "do web3". I wish more people would give it a serious look.

I work at Tlon (the main startup behind urbit, so disclaimer) - it's a lot easier to use urbit now than it used to be thanks to free hosting.

It needs to be a lot easier still (particularly the mobile experience isn't there yet without a fully formed app), but if it's been a while it's worth checking out again: https://tlon.io/

It'll be insanely hard to actually pull off, but it's the only attempt in this space that I think has a legitimate chance of a successful outcome. The others are dead on arrival because they don't actually fix the underlying issues. (Success being widespread adoption of software the users actually own and control.)

I personally self-host mine which has also gotten a lot easier too: https://martiancomputing.substack.com/p/product-review-nativ...

The UX needs to be just as good as a centralized service - I think urbit is the only design where that's really plausible (without recentralizing).

Thoughts on Nostr?

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