Hi everybody, I'm holding a meetup in the DFW area for people interested in Urbit next month. If you're interested in the project or want to learn more about it, come hang out! Details are at the end of the post. I've got the blessing of u/ZorbaTHut to post this here contingent on explaining why Urbit is interesting, both in general and for this audience, so I'll give you a brief outline of the project if you're not familiar, and answer questions you may have once I'm home from work on Monday (though I encourage anybody else who'd like to to chime in until then -- I have to go to bed soon.)
What is Urbit?
Urbit is an interenet decentralization project, and a full networked computing stack from the ground up. Urbit's ultimate goal is to build a new internet on top of the old one, that is architecturally designed to avoid the need for centralized services by allowing individuals to run and program robust personal servers that are simple to manage. When Urbit conquers the world, your digital identity will be something you personally permanently own as a cryptographic key, not an line in a corporation's database; Facebook and Twitter will be protocols -- encrypted traffic and data shared directly between you and your friends & family, with no middlemen spying on you; your apps, social software and anything you program will have secure cryptocurrency payment mechanisms as a system call, payed out of a wallet on a device you fully control; and you will tangibly own and control your computer and the networked software you use on it.
As I said, Urbit is a stack; at its core is Nock, a minimal, turing-complete function. Nock is built out into a deterministic operating system, Arvo, with its own functional programming language. For now, Arvo runs as a process, with a custom VM/interpreter on *nix machines. Your Arvo instance talks to other instances over a native, encrypted peer-to-peer network, though it can interface with the normal internet as well. Urbit's identity management system is called Azimuth, a public key infrastructure built on Ethereum. You own proof of your Urbit instance's identity as a token in the same way you own your Bitcoin wallet.
Because the peer-to-peer network is built into Arvo, you get it 'for free' with any software you write or run on it. You run your own personal server, and run all the software you use to communicate with the world yourself. Because all of your services are running on computer you control using a single secure identity system, you can think of what it aspires to like a decentralized, cypherpunk version of WeChat -- a programmable, secure platform for everything you want to do with your computer in one place, without the downsides of other people running your software.
Why is it interesting?
Urbit is extremely ambitious and pretty strange. Why throw out the entire stack we've spent half a century building? Because it's a giant ball of mud -- millions of lines of code in the Linux kernel alone, with all the attendant security issues and complexity. You can run a personal server today if you're technically sophisticated; spin up a VPS, install all the software you need, configure everything and keep it secure. It's doable, but it sucks, and your mom can't do it. Urbit is designed from the beginning to avoid the pitfalls that led to cascading system complexity. Nock has 12 opcodes, and Arvo is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 lines of code. The core pieces of Urbit are also ticking towards being 'frozen' -- reaching a state where they can no longer be changed, in order to ensure that they remain absolutely minimal. The point of all of this is to make a diamond-hard, unchanging core that a single person can actually understand in its entirety, ensure the security of the architecture, prevent insane dependency hell and leaky abstractions from overgrowing it, and allow for software you write today to run in a century. It also aims to be simple enough that a normal person can pay a commodity provider $5/mo (or something), log into their Urbit on their devices, and control it as easily as their phone.
Urbit's network also has a routing hierarchy that is important to understand; while the total address space is 128-bit, the addresses are partitioned into different classes. 8-bit and 16-bit addresses act as network infrastructure, while human instances use 32-bit addresses. To use the network, you must be sponsored by the 16-bit node 'above' you -- which is to say 'be on good terms'. If you aren't on good terms, that sponsorship can be terminated, but that goes both ways -- if you don't like your sponsor, you can exit and choose another. Because 32-bit addresses are finite, they're scarce and have value, which disincentivizes spam and abuse. To be clear, the sponsor nodes only sign/deliver software updates, and perform peer discovery and NAT traversal; your connections with other people are direct and encrypted. Because there are many sponsor nodes, you can return to the network if you're kicked off unfairly. In the long term, this also allows for graceful political fragmentation of the network if necessary.
The world created by Urbit is a world where individuals control their own data and digital communities live according to their mores. It's an internet that isn't funded by mass automated surveillance and ad companies that know your health problems. It's also the internet as a frontier like it once was, at least until this one is settled. Apologies if this comes off a little true-believer-y, but this project is something I'm genuinely excited about.
For r/TheMotte
The world that Urbit aims to build is one not dissimilar from Scott's archipelago communism -- one of voluntaristic relations and communities, and exit in the face of conflict & coercion. It's technical infrastructure to move the internet away from the chokepoints of the major social media platforms and the concentration of political power that comes with centralized services. The seismic shifts affecting our institutions and society caused by the internet in the last decade have been commented on at length here and elsewhere, but as BTO said, you ain't seen nothin' yet. I suspect many people with a libertarian or anti-authoritarian bent would appreciate the principle of individual sovereignty over their computing and data. The project is also something I've discussed a few times with others on here, so I know there's some curiosity about it.
The original developer of Urbit is also rather well known online, especially around here. Yarvin is a pretty controversial figure, but he departed the project in early 2019.
Meetup
There's a lot more that I haven't mentioned, but I hope this has piqued your interest. If you're in DFW, you can find details of the first meetup here. There will be free pizza and a presentation about Urbit, help installing & using it (Mac & Linux only for now), as well as the opportunity to socialize. All are welcome! Feel free to bring a friend.
If you're not in North Texas but are interested, there are also other regional meetups all over the world coming up soon.
Further reading:
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Urbit Primer (I prefer this one as a general intro)
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