Galaxy holder here. AMA.

It's very disappointing to see all of the knee-jerk reactions about urbit here.

I bought my galaxy from Tlon a couple of years ago before Curtis left the project. I don't know Curtis, only met him once for a brief lunch. I used to browse his blog, and honestly found it thought-provoking but ultimately wrong. To say that I don't share his political and philosophical views would be an understatement.

And yet, I find that the structure of the Urbit network means that it doesn't matter. I have my galaxy and I can do what I want with it, which will definitely at times not be what Tlon wants me to do with it, and if you are a planet or a star under my galaxy and you don't like it you can move to another. There are 255 other galaxies and 64,999 other stars.

I don't understand the criticism of this being digital feudalism. I mean, if you want to call a planet a "peasant", and you want to say that stars and galaxies are some sort of feudal lord, then okay, but specifically what do you mean? As opposed to Facebook, or Google, as a galaxy owner I don't have your data, can't look at your traffic, and can't monetize your personal information. I can't spam you. The only thing I can do is block you, and in five minutes you can switch over to another galaxy. As long as there is one independent galaxy out of 256, then every person on the network can switch over to that galaxy. There's no monopoly power here unless you own all 256 galaxies, which would basically amount to a failure of the whole system and frankly I don't see how that could happen. I'm not selling mine.

There is also a lot of criticism about selling address space. Well, of course there are 4 billion addresses, and at $10 a piece, that's a lot of money some day if the network succeeds. But if the network succeeds, we are talking about a new Internet, and I think $40 billion is modest. It's also important to be clear that for everyone who bought address space already, we certainly didn't pay $10 per address, so Tlon isn't laughing all the way to the bank. And as a galaxy holder, I'm figuring that planet prices go down and maybe go as low as five dollars each or free as a loss leader. The money will be made in providing hosting and value added services on top of the network, and what exactly is wrong with that? Right now, OS1 has a built-in blog application, a chat application, a slack clone, and a reddit clone. Short on features, sure, but if all of that isn't worth a one time fee of $5, then I would argue you're just being a stubborn polemicist.

I'm also a critic of the tendency to be obscure. Curtis' trollishness, without a doubt comes out in the programming language. Again, I don't really care. I don't know Hoon. Maybe i'll learn it at some point. Hoon school classes are constantly full. People will learn it. For those who don't want to, there will be APIs, so that I can write in my native language. That's totally possible, and the whole thing is open source.

Finally, the whole "I can't figure out how to use it argument" is not unique to Urbit. Yes, the documentation needs to be improved. Yes the sign-up process needs to be improved. That is priority #1 from the team. But really, how easy is linux to use? In my opinion, not. I've been a mediocre developer for 10 years, and I still can't maintain my own box. I set up a server 10 years ago, and I went to set up that same server, with the same software today, and running the same commands doesn't give me the same thing. All new versions, with all new dependencies, some of them conflict. I break out in cold sweats every time I have to do a security update or upgrade, afraid that everything is going to break. The only thing to do is learn the new magic phrases to make the box do exactly what I want it to do. For me Linux is totally opaque, obscure, and I've given up on understanding it.

I am assured by the team, and I believe them, that we will have easy, non technical installation and hosting by the end of the year.

And that's why i'm excited about Urbit. It's an IOS and app store that I own and control 100%. It's a VPS that (soon) will just work, that maintains itself, that keeps my data under my control. It's a merciful exit from this horrible, dare I say it, feudalistic system in which the lords of FB, Google, and the like own and use (abuse) my data as they please.

So, I get it if you have impressions of the project based on how it was two or five years ago, but you are mistaken. The core developers on Urbit are some of the hardest working, competent, and idealistic people i've ever met. It's a joy to be involved, which is not what I can say about a lot of projects.

The thing I love most about Urbit is it's not blowing $1 billion on marketing, or trying to be the cool thing on the block. Ever since I've been involved, they have quietly kept their head down and shipped. Even against all of the hate, and I have a lot of respect for that. Go watch the launch event for OS1 and watch one of the core developers talking about how badly he wants to build the best e-reader ever, and tell me that the passion isn't contagious.