Shoggoth
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2019
What the fuck is Urbit and why is it the solution for everything?
Or - why you should use Urbit, and so should your mom.
Urbit is an ambitious project by one absolute madman (Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin) to reinvent the Internet from scratch.
In Yarvin's conception, which I accept and will refer to from hereon, the Internet has failed in its purpose.
The internet was supposed to be a peer to peer network where you'd talk to other operators. It has become a wasteland of clients who all access servers in a manner very similar to terminals and mainframes of old. Total fail.
The three main ways in which the Internet has failed:
Data:
It is clear that we do not own our data. We are more like data cows for big spy conglomerates. Our data is locked in. From the content we produce to our contacts and metadata (muh feeds, muh tags). Most protocols are not open, too.
System:
The web sucks. Modern software sucks. Everything is bloated. You couldn't read your operating system's kernel if you wanted to, because it's too freaking long. Critical parts of infrastructure can turn out to be a library maintained by a thankless developer for over a decade. Not a stable model.
Identity:
Not only do we not own our data, we don't own our identity. We have no control over how our data is stored and handled. Data breaches and hacks are common. But worse is that we trust any of the services which proxy our identity with it, i.e. if service is discontinued for any reason, by either the service itself or because it got taken down (KF, Gab, Parler) the identity goes with it.
This is such a big mess that Yarvin has decided to throw it all out and go back to basics. How would a computer designed by smart Martians would look like?
Urbit encompasses many aspects. It is an identity model, a network for said identities, a formal spec, a virtual machine (VM), an operating system, set of protocols and an application suit.
By starting from a minimal and axiomatic specification, Urbit can remain small and simple. This solves the system problem.
By providing an identity model and network, the identity problem is solved.
By fixing identity and the system and some careful design you can solve the problem with data.
I won't go too much into technical details in this overview because there's a lot to cover anyway.
Urbit is a personal server (personal as in personal computer) which unifies services, data and identity. It is not a social network, a secret club, or functional programming hour with moldbug (unless you want it to be).
The names of everything are stupid. You get used to it.
The components of Urbit:
"Okay retard," I hear you say, "That's a perfectly good reason not to use Google services, Twitter or Facebook, but what about the Fediverse?"
The Fediverse doesn't essentially solve any of the three issues with the modern Internet. It makes them smaller, yes, but you still sign on to someone else's server. You can't migrate your data across instances, you can't migrate your identity across services (pleroma, mastodon, peertube will all need separate accounts), and self hosting is a fuck. It's complex and resource intensive. It also leaks your IP if you do it at home, and you still need DNS.
Discord is run by tranny jannies who shut down a good-boy server, any Fedi solution requires signing on to someone's server. Learn from Null's experience .
Any corner you can run to can be taken down unless you're location independent. Urbit, being completely portable can be run on a RPi from your room or from a VPS just the same. Your entire state is frozen in a single directory. Just move it to another machine and run from there. With no centralized authority in the network and no means to effectively take a peer out of the network from the outside, you can finally communicate freely.
Urbit's future:
It's true that in terms of features the Fediverse probably has Urbit beat, but that's temporary. In the meanwhile, Urbit is constantly improving. Some features coming in the future:
Running Urbit:
Pretty simple, follow the instructions, shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
(edit) Alternatively, use this bundle. Yes, it's an Electron app, but if you don't want to bother with the CLI at all, it takes care of everything for you. Pretty fool proof.
Buying Urbit identities:
You can try the network out with a junk anon identity (a comet), but comets are considered plebs, beneath trash, and not taken seriously by peers. Fully fledged members of the network are Planets. I bought mine on urbit.live . The ETH gas prices are pretty terrible, but you can get away with a planet+gas under 100$.
Hosting Urbit:
You can run Urbit on your PC. Some run it on a raspberry pie. Some on a VPS. Pick a solution right for you, but if you decide to join the network, it's better if the host will remain online. Whatever you do, don't run the same identity at the same time on two different locations. Good luck fixing a split brain.
Privacy and discoverability:
Due to its p2p nature, and groups being able to be private, everyone can exist on Urbit in parallel and not even know who's doing what and where. It's one of the neater things about it. No one can poke their nose into your business, see what's going on, and tattle to media/hosting/NGOs. Your grandma, bless her heart, can be on the cats group, sharing pictures of mittens, while you're in Spandrell's group shouting in the Shouting Box about niggers. You can share funny pictures and no one outside the group of recipients will know.
The community:
There is no "Urbit community", although there's an Urbit Community group as a sort of gateway for new users. Public groups can choose to publicize themselves on the index group. There are groups on a selection of topics, from weeb music to sleep quality, from political extremism to a group dedicated to hosting on raspberry pies.
There are intelligent and interesting people on Urbit, from monks and musicians to CEOs and political extremists.
I think we're going in a direction where we'll have to end up self-hosting. The smallest level of self hosting is individual, and with Urbit it's stupidly easy, and simple to use. The only current pain point is acquiring the identity itself.
Urbit is fun, it works, and as the tech world will get worse in the coming years, I think it will become more important. It's a bit in the virgin land state at the moment, but it's also the easiest phase to put a stake in.
Further reading:
Why self host:
Urbit:
spandrell.com
Yarvin on Urbit, read only if you have the energy for it
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/personal-cloud-computing-in-2020-or-not/ - more to the point
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem - more meandering
Yarvin on technical aspects of Urbit, requires even more energy
Media:
Landscape, the Urbit web client (older picture, bit more polished now)
The Stack podcast
Interviews
www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com
Or - why you should use Urbit, and so should your mom.
Urbit is an ambitious project by one absolute madman (Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin) to reinvent the Internet from scratch.
In Yarvin's conception, which I accept and will refer to from hereon, the Internet has failed in its purpose.
The internet was supposed to be a peer to peer network where you'd talk to other operators. It has become a wasteland of clients who all access servers in a manner very similar to terminals and mainframes of old. Total fail.
The three main ways in which the Internet has failed:
- Data are pwned.
- The system is pwned.
- Identity is pwned.
Data:
It is clear that we do not own our data. We are more like data cows for big spy conglomerates. Our data is locked in. From the content we produce to our contacts and metadata (muh feeds, muh tags). Most protocols are not open, too.
System:
The web sucks. Modern software sucks. Everything is bloated. You couldn't read your operating system's kernel if you wanted to, because it's too freaking long. Critical parts of infrastructure can turn out to be a library maintained by a thankless developer for over a decade. Not a stable model.
Identity:
Not only do we not own our data, we don't own our identity. We have no control over how our data is stored and handled. Data breaches and hacks are common. But worse is that we trust any of the services which proxy our identity with it, i.e. if service is discontinued for any reason, by either the service itself or because it got taken down (KF, Gab, Parler) the identity goes with it.
This is such a big mess that Yarvin has decided to throw it all out and go back to basics. How would a computer designed by smart Martians would look like?
Urbit encompasses many aspects. It is an identity model, a network for said identities, a formal spec, a virtual machine (VM), an operating system, set of protocols and an application suit.
By starting from a minimal and axiomatic specification, Urbit can remain small and simple. This solves the system problem.
By providing an identity model and network, the identity problem is solved.
By fixing identity and the system and some careful design you can solve the problem with data.
I won't go too much into technical details in this overview because there's a lot to cover anyway.
Urbit is a personal server (personal as in personal computer) which unifies services, data and identity. It is not a social network, a secret club, or functional programming hour with moldbug (unless you want it to be).
The names of everything are stupid. You get used to it.
The components of Urbit:
- VM: The Urbit VM is called Nock. It is formally specified and very simple to understand. You can write your own Knock implementation in an afternoon if you know how to program.
- Higher level programming language: Hoon. Like Urbit's C, but looks like it was written by a guy on acid. He probably was on acid.
- Operating system: Does everything you'd expect an OS to do. Includes network stack, file system, application sandbox, web server, gatewawy, and Lanscape, a social agent
- Urbit executable: Urbit is a static executable. Stupidly easy to run, zero dependencies or orchestration.
- Landscape: When you run an Urbit process, by navigating to localhost:8080 you can access a web client for Urbit's social functions. As of April 2021 it supports DMs, groups (aggregates of channels), channels of three types: chat (like discord, slack, w.e.), index (link dump, similar to HN) and notebook (text publishing in markdown, embeds images, etc.)
- Identity: Every process running on the Urbit network is tied to a cryptographically signed identity with which all communications are signed and verified. Routing is source independent, i.e. it does not matter which machine it came from, by way of which machines, but *who sent it*. Ownership of the Urbit identities is managed and transferred on the Ethereum network. It's like a NFT, but actually useful and worth a damn. This is used only to get your Urbit keys, nothing more. The identity is artificially scarce and costs ETH which prevents bots, Sybil attacks, sock puppets and other annoyances.
- Peers: The Urbit network is a fully peer to peer network with no centralized authority or identity management. Every peer on the network is a server. When you join a group, you communicate with someone else's server. When people join your group, they talk to your server. *You* are serving them content. On the axis of platform/publisher, on the Urbit network *everyone* is a publisher. Every message is published by a unique identity.
- Hierarchy: this is a bit involved, but there's a hierarchy of identities on Urbit, Galaxies (256), Stars (~65k), Planets (~4e9) (Moons and Comets). Higher hierarchies have extra responsibilities in terms of routing communications and distributing software updates. They also have the power to censure, but theoretically as long as one Star is willing to sponsor your planet, you're okay. I don't think that's a problem.
"Okay retard," I hear you say, "That's a perfectly good reason not to use Google services, Twitter or Facebook, but what about the Fediverse?"
The Fediverse doesn't essentially solve any of the three issues with the modern Internet. It makes them smaller, yes, but you still sign on to someone else's server. You can't migrate your data across instances, you can't migrate your identity across services (pleroma, mastodon, peertube will all need separate accounts), and self hosting is a fuck. It's complex and resource intensive. It also leaks your IP if you do it at home, and you still need DNS.
Discord is run by tranny jannies who shut down a good-boy server, any Fedi solution requires signing on to someone's server. Learn from Null's experience .
Any corner you can run to can be taken down unless you're location independent. Urbit, being completely portable can be run on a RPi from your room or from a VPS just the same. Your entire state is frozen in a single directory. Just move it to another machine and run from there. With no centralized authority in the network and no means to effectively take a peer out of the network from the outside, you can finally communicate freely.
Urbit's future:
It's true that in terms of features the Fediverse probably has Urbit beat, but that's temporary. In the meanwhile, Urbit is constantly improving. Some features coming in the future:
- Video and audio streaming (i.e. chats)
- Activity feeds of your subscriptions
- BTC wallet integration. This is pretty huge. ~faggot-morzod will be able to send ~nul BTC at the click of a button. (edit: by end of this month https://urbit.org/blog/interplanetary-commerce/)
- Some solution to ridiculous ETH gas fees.
Running Urbit:
Pretty simple, follow the instructions, shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
(edit) Alternatively, use this bundle. Yes, it's an Electron app, but if you don't want to bother with the CLI at all, it takes care of everything for you. Pretty fool proof.
Buying Urbit identities:
You can try the network out with a junk anon identity (a comet), but comets are considered plebs, beneath trash, and not taken seriously by peers. Fully fledged members of the network are Planets. I bought mine on urbit.live . The ETH gas prices are pretty terrible, but you can get away with a planet+gas under 100$.
Hosting Urbit:
You can run Urbit on your PC. Some run it on a raspberry pie. Some on a VPS. Pick a solution right for you, but if you decide to join the network, it's better if the host will remain online. Whatever you do, don't run the same identity at the same time on two different locations. Good luck fixing a split brain.
Privacy and discoverability:
Due to its p2p nature, and groups being able to be private, everyone can exist on Urbit in parallel and not even know who's doing what and where. It's one of the neater things about it. No one can poke their nose into your business, see what's going on, and tattle to media/hosting/NGOs. Your grandma, bless her heart, can be on the cats group, sharing pictures of mittens, while you're in Spandrell's group shouting in the Shouting Box about niggers. You can share funny pictures and no one outside the group of recipients will know.
The community:
There is no "Urbit community", although there's an Urbit Community group as a sort of gateway for new users. Public groups can choose to publicize themselves on the index group. There are groups on a selection of topics, from weeb music to sleep quality, from political extremism to a group dedicated to hosting on raspberry pies.
There are intelligent and interesting people on Urbit, from monks and musicians to CEOs and political extremists.
I think we're going in a direction where we'll have to end up self-hosting. The smallest level of self hosting is individual, and with Urbit it's stupidly easy, and simple to use. The only current pain point is acquiring the identity itself.
Urbit is fun, it works, and as the tech world will get worse in the coming years, I think it will become more important. It's a bit in the virgin land state at the moment, but it's also the easiest phase to put a stake in.
Further reading:
Why self host:
Urbit:
Bloody Shovel 2 - We will drown and nobody shall save us
We will drown and nobody shall save us
spandrell.com
Yarvin on Urbit, read only if you have the energy for it
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/personal-cloud-computing-in-2020-or-not/ - more to the point
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem - more meandering
Yarvin on technical aspects of Urbit, requires even more energy
Media:
Landscape, the Urbit web client (older picture, bit more polished now)
The Stack podcast
Interviews
#205 Galen Wolfe-Pauly: Urbit - A Digital Republic Reinventing the Internet
Support the show, consider donating: BTC: 1CD83r9EzFinDNWwmRW4ssgCbhsM5bxXwg (https://epicenter.tv/tipbtc)ETH: 0x8cdb49ca5103Ce06717C4daBBFD4857183f50935 (ht...
www.youtube.com
Reimagining The Internet Panel - FinTechSV & Tacen 2021-02-25
When the internet was first created, it was intended to serve as a resilient tool intended to survive nuclear mutually assured destruction. Recent events hav...
www.youtube.com
H: Home with Galen Wolfe-Pauly
@niftynei sits down with Galen, co-founder of Tlon an Urbit-system company, to talk about digital spaces and homes.Tlon: https://tlon.io/ Urbit: https://urbi...
www.youtube.com
Ep. 9: Galen Wolfe-Pauly wants to build a more human-centric internet.
Many of us (including your hosts) spend huge amounts of time on the internet. It is responsible for launching whole new industries, new ways of connecting, a...
www.youtube.com
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