I know I'm shouting into the void here, and under a pseudonym to boot, but this is an active FOSS project that real live people work on in their spare time because they hope it'll be important and useful. I like to think it's a convention here not to shit on such people for comedy value.
Behind the impenetrable jargon, Urbit has always put a lot of emphasis on this "digital real estate" aspect. For example:
"Urbit IDs are property, and we think of the entire registry of Urbit IDs as a vast territory of digital land." [https://urbit.org/overview/urbit-id]
It's not exactly an altruistic open source project if your fundamental motivation is to become a member of the digital landowner upper class.
(And if you scratch the surface of Urbit, you'll find the creator is a reactionary extremist who has said he prefers feudalism to democracy. Those ideas are embedded in the platform design that makes lip service to decentralization but actually concentrates control to the very few.)
Thirty years ago I would have been on this train. No question. It's giving me early 90s internet optimism techno-utopia feels. Now I'm older and a lot more jaded, I think I'll give it a miss and set my sights lower with something like Gemini for my weird niche internet protocol needs.
The deliberately impenetrable jargon reminds me of 90s-era Wired's reader-hostile graphic design. We're so cool, we can put barriers in your way and you'll clamber over them to get to us. That's a marketing technique - I've heard it called challenge appeal.
All federated solutions need some kind of trust model. Money is not, at first glance, a terrible answer to that problem (hashcash for email, and some web forums charge a few dollars for accounts just to keep the spammers out). Mastodon delegates trust to the instance admin, Scuttlebutt limits its web of trust to two degrees. But this elaborate tiered model is just unnecessary - they must have considered, and rejected, proof of work or many other possible solutions. It's sad that I assume bad faith because of someone's political position, but so it goes on the post-enshitiffication internet. The trust has already been eroded.
Isn't it interesting that a piece of software can be the concrete embodiment of a philosophy?
That's funny, and it is OK to make fun of it.
Probably, as they were asking for it by doing their work in cultish style. If you want to change the world, you need people to accept the change you want to bring, and for that you must make it understandable, approachable for them.
Why would I need to put a lot of effort to be able to be part of a discussion which is seemingly not intended for me? If the ideas behind it prove to be useful, they will eventually resurface/be done by a more welcoming/industry standard way. Then it will be worth the effort. Until then if I want to waste my time on esoteric nonsense I go look at the Woynich Manuscript or read schizo larp on /x/. (Or just try to keep up with the SV JS scene where everything is reinvedted ignoring every industry standard ligo and is named crazily)
> this is an active FOSS project that real live people work on in their spare time because they hope it'll be important and useful.
So what? There are lots of other project done on the same basis, and for most of them you don't have to learn a new dialect just to understand what their work is about.
For me it’s also a red flag: Neither system seems to be designed to be approachable. One or two brand names are OK, but these systems seem to use them way too liberally.
They may not grasp every little thing, but they would be likely to get an understanding.
But the use of deliberately weird terms for things makes it less possible for those who likely have overlapping domain knowledge to understand these systems or posts about them.
But there's also probably some new and interesting criticisms one could make? Perhaps about the actual project described in the article? And maybe after having read it and understand it? That doesn't seem like too high a standard.
The fact is that’s a major red flag.
Also I’m not sure you get to claim boredom with the answer to a question you directly asked.
this would be a true "personal server", and it will achieve much more than Urbit ever could.. except insane jargon at least...
And that's not because I am beefing with him or have any personal beef with him. He's literally not there anymore. He went away, years ago.
Urbit is really an outlier, with jargon/innovation fraction far exceeding anything else I have seen.