The Fate of Urbit "What got us here was pretending that we're more successful and more real than we are" -
@curtis_yarvinon the crisis hitting
@urbitMy big picture take on Urbit is that it failed because it tried to innovate in too many different directions and therefore became a long-term vaporware/passion project for certain types of nerd. The original idea of Urbit (Conceived by Yarvin in 2002) was to usher in a new paradigm for computing that was more suited to the internet. In particular, a person's 'Ship' or 'Planet' was supposed to be a standardized personal server so that anyone could host a web app, instead of it being limited to just big tech companies. In addition people had a desire for censorship resistance and digital self-reliance. If anyone can host a webapp on their own hardware, big tech monopolies won't be able to ruin our lives with censorship. And given the Twitter Files drama and Elon having to buy Twitter, it seems that the vision has some serious merit. It's a nice vision, but it is now 22 years after the project was started and certainly over a decade after serious development started and if you go and try to use Urbit, it is shit. You cannot use it on mobile. The user interface looks like it is from 1993. There are very few users. You need to futz around with all sorts of technical stuff to get started. And there aren't really many useful apps - Android has millions of useful apps and a very highly optimized user interface. The world has fairly strongly moved towards a model of computing where the vast majority of human users are passive consumers who click buttons on a touchscreen. In that model of computing, Big Tech companies make a lot more sense than the Urbit vision of personal standard servers does. Urbit would probably be more useful if it just became a normal big tech company that used a bunch of boring, standard technologies with a right/libertarian-leaning founding team. To a significant extent, Elon has stepped up and filled that need with X and X dot AI. X is a big tech company, led by a real modern caesar, it doesn't innovate in unnecessary directions like functional programming and stateless operating systems. It just provides a clicky-button experience for social media with X and now for LLMs with X dot AI. The only innovation is that it's more right/libertarian-leaning, and that works great. I don't think the Urbit vision can be salvaged without a massive pivot. If I was in charge, I would fully pivot Urbit to a standard tech stack and abandon all the functional programming circlejerking and focus on providing useful freedom products. For example, distributed hosting of web content/AI with things like
@NativePlanetIOor perhaps something like a freedom phone with much more user control, anti-tech addiction, semantic filters powered by AI, etc. But I am merely a guy with a snake, so what do I know? 🔲