I will not defend Urbit, though I count myself lucky to read fossuser's posts where I find them. I would argue about digital land ownership and what the internet's users (and possible future users) need though. I'm interested in what the internet is for (like everything else). Would you like to have a serious conversation about that? That does seem a worthy topic, even if Urbit does not address it effectively enough (I'm still not convinced it won't centralize power). I suggest the workers must own the means of production. What do you think?
- IDs stop the spam problem and give people control over something that keeps its reputation (and they're cheap).
- Federated systems normally suck because administering the servers and keeping decentralized versions in sync is hard. Urbit's design fixes this.
- Encrypted by default, ability to be as easy to run as FB (eventually, not right now). Peer to peer with the address space and key issues solved from first principles.
- Stability over long time horizons due to design (goal being indefinite), the urbit abstraction layer doesn't change and state can always be recomputed - changing pieces are implemented via jets to communicate with whatever underlying OS is doing the normal stuff.
It's a clever design and solves a lot of problems with modern computing, people often dismiss it out of hand because Yarvin's politics are stupid (he's no longer involved in the project and hasn't been for some time). Peter Thiel's Trump support was stupid too, but that doesn't mean he doesn't get a lot of other stuff right.