Why the downvotes? In their video, it looks like they don't provide any computing power or storage - you need to host it yourself, i.e. run the VM somehow. Who in their wrong mind would replace a secure and redundant centralized system with unreliable and self-maintained (or more like - self-neglected) one? This would never be mass market! Plus, you think Facebook would integrate with them or any major service that hopes to keep you hostage?!

If Urbit fails to become as easy to run as an iPhone, Urbit fails. That's an explicit design goal. It seems improbable, but who knows?

I don't have a Facebook account, but my understanding is that it supports app integrations, and that connected apps have access to the account information you choose to share with them. Why wouldn't this work for Urbit? And why, in theory, wouldn't Urbit be able to support a distributed Facebook in the same way that GNU social supports a distributed Twitter?

The concerning part would seem to me to be how you cope with a situation where you have some people hosting their stuff on their urbits, and others still on Facebook; I don't see a solution here that does not require technical cooperation from Facebook, which as you rightly note will not likely be forthcoming.

As I know to my cost, people stick to Facebook because Facebook owns their social lives, so people aren't going to risk trying to emancipate themselves from Facebook unless they can do so without maybe losing all their friends. No one at Tlön has articulated anything like a clear solution to this problem, and I think it would be a very good idea if they did, because it will kill them if they don't watch out.

Urbit has continuously failed to explain what it is here where people are way above average IQ. It's doomed.

And yet it manages to retain the enduring interest, both cognitive and financial, of other people who are no less likely to be of above average IQ than Hacker News commenters. Perhaps there's something about Urbit that makes it unappealing to people who are likely to hang out on Hacker News, or vice versa. Or perhaps it's doomed and those people just haven't noticed yet. Or something else might be going on. There's really no telling just yet.

You're missing the difference here between "useful" and "interesting", the latter being a techie jargon word meaning "what the hell even is that" or "I ain't even mad, that's amazing."

Urbit is provably effective at generating techie amazement, and I can well believe it created enough for well-off people to spend money on address space for the amusement value (at least one has explicitly said that's why he bought some). Urbit is a legitimate mad art project, an untrammelled 200-proof expression of its creator's personality; that is in fact interesting.

This is not, however, the same as usefulness.

I don't think anyone has yet made a claim of usefulness on Urbit's behalf. Certainly no one at Tlon has!

There always will be greedy people who didn't even get that this is not a craptocurrency that they can resell. It's explained on the website!

The community long predates the crowdsale.