An Honest Look at Urbit

This seems like a pretty shallow take. Urbit is (or aspires to be) a platform for server-side use cases; complaining that it&#x27;s not decentralized is kind of off the mark. But I (more bullish on urbit than 95% of HN, I suspect) agree with this bit:<p>&gt; the deepest problem with Urbit: it’s light on actual substance.<p>At heart, urbit is a platform with no compelling software for it yet, and hence subject to the chicken-and-egg problem that was on the HN front page again today[0]. And urbit is famously hard to develop for, which ought to be enough to spell its doom. But I still check in on it every year or so, because it keeps on plugging away, and what it does have (exactly-once messaging, built-in crypto, and a goofy-but-it-works identity&#x2F;networking system that allows you to do away with app level authentication) is kind of nifty and it&#x27;s still not totally clear that it won&#x27;t go somewhere eventually.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;05&#x2F;24&#x2F;strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;05&#x2F;24&#x2F;strategy-letter-ii...</a>

&gt;If Urbit were reimagined in 2021, it would be running on Sia or Ethereum: your data is stored on the blockchain, your applications are running as perpetual smart contracts, and you can access it from anywhere in the world with just your private key.<p>This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what smart contracts do. Every miner runs every smart contract every time something is executed. It would be disastrously expensive to run a server on top of Ethereum.<p>Urbit&#x27;s network infrastructure was &quot;reimagined&quot; to use Ethereum for identification.<p>&gt;Hosting on my own hardware is annoying, hosting in the centralized cloud defeats the whole point.<p>Is there actually a third option? I&#x27;m wondering of the author simply misunderstands Ethereum.

Does it still require payment to get a “proper” identity? And if you actually want to run something, well, I hope you have your wallet ready…<p>And not to mention the insane efforts they put in to use uncommon and bizarre terms for <i>everything</i>.<p>imho, Urbit is a scam and a cult, created by a man with a serious hardon for monarchies (non other than Curtis Yarvin) who figured that he could create his own religion and become king. Or at least larp as one.<p>I tried it. I see no technical merit in it. What does it let me do I cant otherwise? Nothing. Even the things it does, it does poorly.<p>p.s. urbit threads on hn are full of duped accounts promoting the platform so beware.

Urbit rant posts never fail to entertain. Lets take a step back and ask us why the Urbit dev team has been going on for years. Where do they get the funding from? What is the motivation if their mission fails to deliver?

&quot;The final nail in the coffin is that – opposite to the real world – in Urbit, 0 is a truthy value, and 1 is falsy. This is the most pretentious, harmful, arrogant, and vain design decision I have seen in years. It underscores that Urbit is not a serious effort but a vanity project.&quot;<p>UNIX Style Considered Harmful <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.opengroup.org&#x2F;onlinepubs&#x2F;9699919799&#x2F;functions&#x2F;errno.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.opengroup.org&#x2F;onlinepubs&#x2F;9699919799&#x2F;functions&#x2F;e...</a>

&gt; Right now it’s just a platform to make peer-to-peer servers.<p>Show me any other platform that allows one to easily build, distribute, and run long-running p2p services that communicate strongly typed data over the wire, or any strong decentralized identity system that can even begin to go toe-to-toe with Urbit.

<p><pre><code> your data is stored on the blockchain, your applications are running as perpetual smart contracts, and you can access it from anywhere in the world with just your private key </code></pre> How would this work if I had O(Tb) of data?

&gt; the deepest problem with Urbit: it’s light on actual substance. Urbit seems to have spent many years developing fundamental infrastructure – programming languages, tools, etc. – that are a gigantic maintenance burden and orthogonal to its actual mission. That’s a huge distraction, and as a consequence, the “stuff you can do with your Urbit server” section was unimpressive.<p>This is really the crux. There&#x27;s nothing on the urbit website but obfuscation of this fact. It&#x27;s a vanity project reinventing everything from scratch, and the &quot;use cases&quot; are post hoc. If they actually cared about those use cases, they&#x27;d do things differently.<p>Urbit is TempleOS, but written by a neoreactionary instead of a schizophrenic. It&#x27;s a weird hobby project not a serious attempt to accomplish anything, and it shows up on HN way more than the actual substance merits.

You know whats most interesting about Urbit to me? That no one, as far as I am aware of, given that its “discoverer” is a conservative, has started a cryptocoin for it. Maybe monarchism is too far from anarchism.. (“One is too far from Zero”)<p>(EDIT: I found a website stub for a urbit cryptocoin though, so Someone must have had an a half baked thing goingoing

When I&#x27;ve tried Urbit it just plain wasn&#x27;t working most of the time

The reason 0 is truthy is the same reason they make up nonsense words like nock and hoon for everything. It’s a cult lol.

What was that blog post the other day about the appeal of simple-but-wrong solutions? Urbit falls into that category. Hoon is supposed to be vastly more productive than &quot;legacy&quot; programming but it&#x27;s been available for years and people have only built simple apps.

Hacker News is heavily ironic when you juxtapose the audience it attracts with the stated mission of upending norms and forging new territory<p>Countless takes here in favor of established banks, for example

There&#x27;s a topic that comes up in the body of this article that is always irritating to read. I won&#x27;t mention the topic, but a parody is below-- see if you can tell which sentence I&#x27;m referring to:<p>&quot;Greetings, reader! I am a parasite that swims around in my host&#x27;s conceptual understanding of an esoteric technology with an incredibly narrow set of use cases. My purpose is to spur writing about me in blogs and forum comments in an attempt to rationalize my existence and exaggerate my use cases. This decreases the likelihood that any of us parasites get pondered and ultimately suffocated with conceptual nail polish by a particular host. And <i>that</i> increases the importance of this esoteric tech in the mind&#x27;s eye of the hosts. So if another parasite is getting fed by reading this, well bon appetite, my friend! If not, please wait patiently for a host near you to explain this exciting investment opportunity.&quot;<p>Edit: wording

&gt; This is where Urbit shows its age: it has no ambition for decentralized server ownership. The notion of a user running their own server, having to guarantee its uptime, backup its data, etc., is antiquated. If Urbit were reimagined in 2021, it would be running on Sia or Ethereum: your data is stored on the blockchain, your applications are running as perpetual smart contracts, and you can access it from anywhere in the world with just your private key.<p>Where does the author think blockchain crap stores things? Hint: It&#x27;s on other people&#x27;s servers.