Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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It is open source, the hierarchy is the minimal necessary to solve the reasons federated systems fail and centralize (spam, public key lookup for p2p encryption, version updates across the system, difficulty of running a linux server).

I work at Tlon so I'm biased, but I joined because I think urbit is the best way to get ourselves out of the local max of computing we're trapped in.

Email is a failure as a federated system (people on a tiny amount of centralized providers), the promise of the web as a decentralized place for people to interact p2p failed (FB, Instagram, etc.).

We're serfs operating accounts that manipulate our attention so that we view more ads on massively centralized systems controlled by companies that have their own incentives. Urbit is an escape of that. You can't fix these issues without fixing the problems earlier up in the computing stack, federated systems on the existing stack are doomed to always be relegated to a tiny hyper-technical niche. Urbit's design means it's possible to get the UX such that everyone could use it (likely most by a provider running the urbit for them).

Federated systems don't even really solve these problems for most users unless you run your own server (an even smaller subset) - you're just trading one dictator for another (and likely it's worse given how subreddit mods behave - mastodon is a good example of this).

https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

im not sure how subreddit mods play into "federated systems". so thats that.

Except on grounds of "the hierarchy is the minimal necessary to solve the reasons federated systems fail and centralize", you and me seem completely aligned (at least concerning this reply)

But otherwise, i agree.

Though i would like to remark that "the web", actually "the whole computing world", started as a hyper-technical niche.

Yeah, I didn’t meant to imply subreddits are federated. I was using them as an example of how a little power like that is usually abused.

Federated systems like mastodon where most people are users on a random person’s server leads to similar dynamics. The server admin is akin to a capricious power hungry Reddit mod. For the user it ends up worse than the centralized systems, both in user experience and in things like privacy/fairness.

In urbit there isn’t a distinction between user and server, the ID and the computer are tied together which is one of the prerequisites for solving the problem of why federated systems fail.

The web started as a hyper technical niche, but most users don’t use the web at that layer - they use FB or Amazon. Urbit is currently a hyper technical niche, but if it wins and users use it then they’ll have more control without needing to understand why. Urbit’s design makes it possible to have a path to UX where that could happen (imo). I think that’s not true of any other system I’ve seen.

If the ID hierarchy bothers you, you can also disable over the air updates and manually manage them. Then you’d only use the hierarchy for routing encrypted traffic and looking up other ID keys. The ability to escape to other infra nodes (stars) provide incentives for those nodes not to abuse routing (similar to pressure against an ISP) or they’ll get a bad reputation.

yikes. first you give me the "all is good in urbit, you cannot get abused, you are a free spirit"-vibe and then:

"The ability to escape to other infra nodes (stars) provide incentives for those nodes not to abuse routing (similar to pressure against an ISP) or they’ll get a bad reputation."

you can move accounts on mastodon too... sure urbit is more like an os ontop everything else while mastodon is just an application amid everything else. but... it reads like cognitive dissonance right there.

On mastodon you’re just an account on someone else’s server (except for the extreme minority that run their own server).

On urbit every user is also their own ‘server’ - there’s no distinction between account and server. Infra nodes just do public key lookups and route encrypted traffic.

As far as abuse risk - you have to design the system to be resilient to it. People behave based on the incentives the design allows. That’s why the web and other federated systems centralize. Urbit is explicitly designed to fix these underlying issues.

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