The founder divested himself of the project yet the current top comment doesn't want to touch Urbit as if it is cursed by his ghost.
It's these same sorts of comments that drag down all discourse because they prohibit any other state than negative. It's these same comments that pollute any healthy attempt at discourse around crypto here with the Evil Eye that just pushes any one with a different idea to the HN hivemind out.
> What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those ideas?
This is explained, in technical and philosophical depth in the links provided you.
In Ron Garrett's words:
> The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.
Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard time believing that. It's alive because an increasing number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing can deny the reality of actual growth — which, in case everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.
But, whatever its technical merits, do you think it can ever get to a point where it reached enough users to be useful (in the "chicken and egg problem" sense that platforms need a critical mass of users to be useful platforms), given the millstone around its neck? Do threads like this (where detailed, technical explanations get downvoted to oblivion, and "I heard Yarvin is racist" is the top comment) make you want to throw in the towel?
If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the people finding us, "I don't think about you at all" reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the tenor of conversation that happens here.
I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit) that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network if you want a planet or something to keep the conversation going.
Is there some progress there btw? Last I checked there was no way to discover apps other than hard work, and sharing them (installing an app someone else had written) was pretty arduous.
edit: and I know HN isn't the whole world, but I suspect it is representative in this case. I just can't imagine any person learning anything about urbit from any source that doesn't get the 2-3 worst things Yarvin has ever written appended to it within the first hour. It's hard to imagine how it ever gets really popular under those circumstances.
Having a large audience of pre-existing users is nice (and ditto for dev ecosystem for tooling and libraries) but ultimately what makes Urbit a good idea is, as Josh says, that we want computers to primarily be doing one set of things and they were originally designed to do a different set of things (with the things they currently do added as a complicated afterthought). A blockchain protocol is in the end a p2p application. It benefits hugely from running on a natively p2p networked operating system with a built-in cryptographic identity infrastructure. If Urbit's technology works, people are going to build on top of it because they need it, and their customers will come to use what they've built because it works better. If the tech didn't work, it wouldn't matter how many people tried it.
You're correct that there is no "Urbit Store" analogous to the Apple Store or the Android Store (this is a feature not a bug for many users, although I sympathize with both perspectives). I'm not sure what you mean about installing apps being arduous - currently you start typing the developer's name into the homepage search bar, it autocompletes, you are given a list of apps they've published, you click the one you're interested in, installation is a few seconds to a few minutes.
First, you have to know the developer's name, and then find the apps that developer produced. This is literally the opposite of what most people do: search for an app (not for a developer) and install it (or search for an app category, and install an app)
My worry would be that "and I wasn't able to find the name of anyone who develops apps!" is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway. In which case we'd have to put a certain amount of work into vetting all these apps and their updates and real users would still find apps the same way - clicking on links to apps their friends are recommending.
This is people's experience, period, not limited to Urbit.
> most people just follow a link from the developer's web page in practice
Or, rather from widely available lists of "10 best apps for X right now".
How do you expect anyone to find any apps in Urbit if there no sites to speak of and no lists of apps to speak of? Here was my experience trying Urbit out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124587
> is complaint #10 on a list of complaints where ##1-9 mean these kinds of people are never going to use Urbit much anyway.
Yes, it's possible number #10 on a list of complaints, but they are not in 1-2-3-...-10 order. It's all of them together.
Put yourself into the shoes of a person starting with Urbit. Download Port. And then tell me what exactly the new user is to do? Suddenly "it's not a huge part of people's experience on Urbit" becomes "the biggest part and the biggest part #1" because there's literally nothing there.
|install ~dister-norsyr-torryn %canvas
edit: yes, there's an ecosystem of developers shipping software now. Here's a screenshot of my homescreen, which I cleaned up a couple of days ago to remove some apps I don't use often: https://imgur.com/7keFr7Y
Of the apps you can see, 13 were created by distinct developers. Some people are more prolific.
Beyond that, your comment doesn't say much. Computing and networking as it exists today, you say, is bad. Urbit is a ground-up rethink of all of it. OK, but there are 10th graders with the same idea (just as there were when I was a 10th grader). What makes Urbit worth taking more seriously than those ideas?