Re:Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes
by nikolay on Thursday June 30, 2016 @01:18PM
(#12010087)
Urbit has continuously failed to explain what it is here where people are way above average IQ. It's doomed.
Re:Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes
by throwanem on Thursday June 30, 2016 @02:06PM
(#12010488)
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.
Re:Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes
by davidgerard on Thursday June 30, 2016 @02:26PM
(#12010635)
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.
Re:Urbit Is Building a 'Virtual Galaxy' for Bitcoin Nodes
by throwanem on Thursday June 30, 2016 @02:48PM
(#12010786)
I don't think anyone has yet made a claim of usefulness on Urbit's behalf. Certainly no one at Tlon has!
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.