Okay, I tried to read some of this, just like I tried once years ago to look at what is Urbit, and I don't get it. Maybe it's profound, but if you can't write roughly two paragraphs that clearly describe it, I'm out.
If you can't get this, I don't see how you're even here on HN, honestly.
As someone who thinks urbit would solve an important use case but is too hopelessly weighed down by the stench of its founder to go anywhere, a good fork seems is a reason for optimism, so best of luck Plunder team!
The whole thing was originated by a man (Curtis Yarvin) with some very questionable political views, and even though he isn't directly involved in the project any more, he seems to have baked some of them into his design of the system.
It has been around for about 13 years and is one of those "we're going to change everything!" projects that never really gets off the ground, but has a tranche of true believers.
At this point it's probably something to be filed in the same sort of mental folder as TempleOS, though with less religion and more authoritarianism.
From a quick read, 'Plunder' appears to be an attempt to use similar ideas to make a slightly more functional system. As such I'd regard it as a little like FreeZone scientology - a splinter group who can see the issue with the church, but still believe in the fundamental model for whatever reason.
> It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.
His projects should probably be viewed through the lens of what he is trying to accomplish more generally.
2. AFAICT some of Yarvin’s ideology, particularly Neo-feudalism, is explicitly baked into Urbit’s design.
The Linux community has broadly decided that the answer to that question is yes. No corporate Linuxes would touch it any more, and it is even scheduled for removal from the kernel.
It’s a system that’s explicitly designed to be really hard to understand and use. Why would that get adopted? How will that succeed?
In this it’s closely related to Scientology and cryptocurrency. Urbit is a distributed computing platform in the same sense as Scientology is a mental health program, or Bitcoin is peer-to-peer electronic cash. Sure, there’s technically someone using it for that, but for most people the value is in the social belief system.
Then they moved it all to Ethereum in 2018 but I had stopped giving a shit so I don't know what happened after that.
I should also note they did an auction of address space prior to Ethereum, seemed like they were trying to get in on the crypto grifts. It's all completely incomprehensible to me even though I used it for a good year or so lol