The heavily layered jargon extracts a commitment from true believers and creates a boundary between those who “get it” and the rest of the world who hasn’t seen the light. It’s not so much a platform to use, but one to proselytize.
In this it’s closely related to Scientology and cryptocurrency. Urbit is a distributed computing platform in the same sense as Scientology is a mental health program, or Bitcoin is electronic peer-to-peer payments. Sure, there’s technically someone using it for that, but for most people the value is in the social belief system.
I signed up when it was new. It used to be you got a 'ship' which was a 12 char string that was essentially your IP/DNS/identity. Then later they changed it to 'planets' and you had to re-register again.
Then they moved it all to Ethereum in 2018 but I had stopped giving a shit so I don't know what happened after that.
I should also note they did an auction of address space prior to Ethereum, seemed like they were trying to get in on the crypto grifts. It's all completely incomprehensible to me even though I used it for a good year or so lol
It’s a system that’s explicitly designed to be really hard to understand and use. Why would that get adopted? How will that succeed?