A couple thoughts from an early backer who really, really wants Urbit to succeed (and fears it won't):

1. What is Urbit?

I'm not involved with it and don't speak for the devs, but this always comes up, so I'll just explain in plain terms what I think Urbit is, or what I hope it will grow up to be. Urbit is the server-app-container thing that would make my non-techy Mom want to pay $5/mo for a hosted server instance.

Imagine if every man, woman and child had their own server. Nothing fancy, just a cheap ECC instance or DigitalOcean droplet or something. What would they do with them? Well, host a webserver I suppose, maybe a mail server, maybe a Minecraft server, stuff like that, right? But, these would have to be accessible to non-sysadmin types, so all of these server applications would have to be easy-as-an-iphone to set up and administer. Right now, such apps don't exist, because there's no market for them. But if the market were there, millions of people with hosted servers just sitting around, you can imagine how quickly they'd get made.

What about a social media? At a high level, every social media app is essentially the same app - they let you upload a file to the cloud and they let your friends access it and they show you ads. The differences between Twitter and FB and Instagram and Snapchat are nothing more than differences in how those three features are implemented. So why do they all use the cloud? Because there aren't a million people with server space just sitting around on which to host their IG pictures and FB arguments and Twitter profundities. But if there were, a good self-hosted social media app would make a lot of sense to build.

Urbit is intended to shortcut this chicken-and-egg problem by making a container in which it is easy to build those things. My Mom can afford a hosted server, but she has nothing to run there. If there were great things to run there, like a Facebook with no ads and a webserver with no hassles, she might rent one. Urbit is intended to be the thing in which those great apps are easy to build.

2. Why I want it

Those are all abstract reasons why something like urbit might succeed. As we all know, the mark of a good startup is not whether you can explain why it might succeed, it's whether there are users who want to use it right now. Well, I do want to use it, but it's hard to explain why. I'll take a stab at it.

If you're over 40, you may remember getting your first shell account. Wasn't that the shit? You want to host some files for colleagues? Just make a directory, chmod it to world-readable. You want to run a web server? Go ahead, and don't worry about security, the only people that can see this are inside your college/company. Want to see what Bill Smith is up to? finger bsmith. Want to argue about politics? talk.politics. God, how simple things were! Playing with Urbit feels like those days to me. It makes a handful of things, like identifying users and sharing files between them, trivial. You could probably write a Twitter clone in less than 1K LOC.

Or at least you could, if Urbit does everything it says it does. That's a big if. Which brings me to...

3. Isn't it really weird and fucked up?

Yes. Oh yes. It is incredibly eclectic, the fevered result of an insane genius toiling away in obscurity on his dream project when he wasn't busy writing interminable political screeds. It is an attempt to combine a bunch of things (a ground-up OS, two new languages, and a novel networking architecture) that might be too much for such a small team. The Hoon language is weirder than you've heard. Some people swear it's great once you get used to it, but the docs are sparse and I haven't invested the effort. And if you do invest the effort, it could well be that it has non-obvious architectural flaws that will doom it to be a buggy mess for all eternity. And on top of that, the founder is primarily known for political rantings that are... well, not racist per se, but close enough to get Urbit boycotted by the sorts of people who boycott obscure open source projects due to things in the founder's blog.

But if it fails, I really hope someone builds something less weird that accomplishes the same thing, because at the end of the day, I want it. I want a cheapo server with a cheapo self-hosted Twitter clone and a cheapo self-hosted FB clone, and I want to share pictures of my kids with my Mom without running them through some enormous corporation's billion-dollar machine-learning advertising algorithm, and I want to host my own website and server apps without taking on "sysadmin" as a night job. And it seems like, right now, Urbit is the fastest way from here to there.