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@urbit

Urbit is a computer built with networking, ownership, and durability as foundational design principles. A computer that you can trust to be yours, forever.
~zod urbit.org Joined September 2013
130 Following 33K Followers 8.1K Posts

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Urbit @urbit
Everyone is just re-deriving Urbit.
Steve Ruiz Verified account @steveruizok 10h
There's a huge product opportunity downstream of Tailscale etc too. At @tldraw we've started designing for "high trust networks" and it's been a beautiful thing.

1. Features that would be a nightmare on the internet are okay on my computer and mostly okay on private networks. Websites that execute user-generated scripts, control production systems, allow for users to send desktop notifications, spend tokens, or directly prompt my agent. Crazy stuff that would only make sense if everyone was in a committed polycule.

2. When everyone on the server can be trusted to have _external_ reasons for good behavior (eg keeping their job, or maintaining friends, family, church, mafia org), the software can be designed in a default social way. Most apps default to isolation, low horizontal visibility, highly restricted collaboration. Makes sense if the social contracts are inside of the app, but if you can trust that they live outside of the app then you can get wild. Example being small group chat names as an emergent comedy phenomenon because anyone in the group can change the name.

3. This can work for commercial products, too, not just internal stuff. Security matters more than ever but the way we've seen that manifest is that more companies are more confident in their own solutions than anything we could provide, to the point where owning data and access is a better value proposition than having it managed. Always has been true for big companies but now even small companies can get a good secure network set up pretty easily, and the hooks we need to build are easy enough.

tldraw offline got us started down this road (and shout out to @pendev for first introducing me to the idea of desktop + mcp). We've been bringing that product to private networks and it's been exciting to see how much we can get away with. Keep an eye out
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Urbit @urbit
Tailscale is ‘free’ because you running it on your home devices and home network is just a product-led growth strategy. Their real business is running this for larger enterprise networks with whole teams of sysadmins that are managing private networks of hundreds and thousands of users and devices.

Or, as people like to point out, ‘just use wireguard’. And then when a normal person balks at it, they tell you to have your agents configure it for you.

These are two sides of the same coin. And that coin is the “the computers you use every day were never designed to be networked” coin. And it’s actually a handful of 20-sided dice, where every time you throw them different ‘solutions’ pop up.

Sometimes it’s the “just let google run your ‘free’ email service (and harvest all your data)” side. Other times it’s the “why do you use Dropbox, just set up an FTP server or use rsync” side.

But you could always just chose to stop playing the game and build your digital life on Urbit instead.

Sure, it’s a little bit less dopamine-infused than a fully featured game of digital craps at the SaaS casino. But it’s yours, and as the open internet floods with threats and slop, Urbit is the Ark. And it welcomes you with open arms.
joseph ∴ Verified account @joeyaflrs 23h
@mschoening @Tailscale running on a year plus now of 'how is tailscale free?' but they've seemingly been 10 steps ahead this whole time
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Urbit @urbit
Tailscale is great. So is UniFi.

And everybody hates cheaters. But…

Why is it that we love our bandaids so much? Wouldn’t it be better to just not have a sucking chest wound in the first place?

Now that we know we want computing to be networked, let’s just rewrite the stack to actually work for the things we want to do: high-trust networked computing.

Not ‘trust me bro the terms of service are totally fine bro just let me be your software middle man bro please’-computing. Computing where you can trust that your connections that are yours. Computing which augments, rather than destroys, your human relationships. Computing that you can truly own, and which you can trust to be yours—forever.

That’s Urbit.
Max Schoening Verified account @mschoening 1d
I think @Tailscale could be 100x larger than it is today in just a few years.

The open internet is dying. Agents will turn it into a toxic wasteland. UniFi, Tailscale, Discord, and AWS all win in that scenario.

Call of Duty lobbies are a good analogy. When games are overrun by cheaters (humanoids), humans retreat to private, high-trust lobbies.

The same thing happened with the Facebook Wall (blast from the past): people retreated to group chats.

Besides not being a cozy place to hang out it’s also dangerous to advertise your existence (dark forest theory of the internet)…

🔐🕸️
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