matildepark

I agree. I think this feedback is super valuable.

Check it. [1]

A lot of people work at Tlon with a lot of different perspectives on the world. It's not a vehicle for one guy. This is sadly a frequently asked question in itself. [2]

[1]: https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/hoon/setup/

[2]: https://urbit.org/faq/#who-is-curtis

It's not deliberate, just a bit of an ongoing challenge. We've historically been very engineering-focused while honing the system; poking our heads out into the world, we now have to describe it.

The problem, I think, is that there's a lot of inference gaps to clear in terms of how people understand computers and how they understand the internet that we simply dispose of. A lot of the project is an attempt to re-architect the entire stack to resist the flaws of the modern internet — everything we take for granted as 'the way it is,' from the annoyances all the way to the downright evil.

High level, start with the Wikipedia entry. [1] Then peek through some higher-level, overview docs. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit

[2] https://urbit.org/docs/tutorials/arvo/

That's a bit cynical, I think. The address space has had a few "official" rationales because it serves a handful of duties at the same time; again, explaining a system is different than explaining a product, but pitching a system as a product is difficult. You often end up framing the system-as-product a specific way each time.

> Urbit is a friendly network: a network on which you can assume that a stranger is nice until proven nasty. Friendliness is a direct consequence of scarce, individually owned identities. We're not changing human nature, just creating the right economic incentives.

> Most forms of network abuse are "Sybil attacks": they rely on an infinite supply of fresh identities. Scarcity makes reputation work. Spam is a business; if the cost of a new planet exceeds the amount of money you can make by spamming from that planet until its reputation is trashed, there will be no spam. [1]

While it's true an intent was selling the parts of the address space Tlon has to fund its development, its business model for consumers going forward isn't really to sell you planets; it's more about bootstrapping the project and offering hosting and support.

For investors, purchasing address space (i.e. a galaxy or star within Tlon's ownership) is a way of investing in an asset that could be a source of income while also having some influence over how the network changes in the future, in the way a stockholder would a company.

Essentially the address space is an attempt to create and maintain ideal incentives for the ICANN-esque players (galaxies), down to the ISP-esque players (stars) and the everyday user (planets), and their devices or additional users (moons) in a way that sustains the entire network.

[1] https://urbit.org/blog/the-urbit-address-space/

D&D isn't necessarily that complex, systematically, if you really lay it out. It's about shared imagination with your friends, mutually improvising a story, and a framework for actualising personal development.

I'm not helping, am I.

It's because it's a system trying to pitch itself as a product. The system being a top to bottom rewrite of the stack in such a way so as to sidestep the client/server relationship entirely. A lot of services rely upon positioning themselves as the server, as the big computer you have timeshared access to, and they monetise your usage. For things like photo storage, or basic communication, or permissioned access to your files, this is pointless. Any computer could do it, but the internet is itself based upon asking a server for something and getting it. And running a server sucks.

Any other peer to peer solution is partial, and therefore not able to compete with the internet as is. Urbit basically plans around an identity system that prevents spam and abuse; a hierarchical packet routing structure for those identities that doubles as a de facto governance model (due to having a vested interest in the network, the higher up you go); a kernel designed to freeze, and its entire OS on top a series of event logs that mark down computations and new states; a functional language for this "internet where every computer is a database", and the encrypted networking protocol that uses UDP while still ensuring packets always find you.

So if you wanted to, say, have a group of people set as a peer list that others can subscribe to or join, or build or use applications that lets that peer list join chats or see a set of files based upon some arbitrary marker (like giving you $5/mo?) ... you don't need a million services to spread the load, one task per service, each person joining each service. You can just use your own computer. It's a personal server platform for a peer to peer internet. It's an internet designed to resist bad actors, and to resist AOL, to resist Facebook and Google — an internet that facilitates and preserves a Usenet-esque model of small communities doing stuff together on their computers.

(Obvious disclosure that I work on the project, again.)

(Obvious disclosure that I work on the project.) Slow, like, literally the VM is slow? There's infrastructure work being done to rewrite the VM at the moment, though there's been some major work in the last six months on this front as well that personally have felt like night and day. Slow, like, the network is slow? There's an update going out shortly with a rewrite for Ames that makes it a bit easier to work on. There's a good blog post [1] our CTO put out on how the infrastructure cost this year has been predominantly on planning a very resilient stack, rewriting a lot of archaic code to be easier to modify by more than just a handful of kernel engineers, more pliant. I feel pretty confident about the performance in future.

[1]: https://urbit.org/blog/stable-arvo/