Thread by @sorreg_namtyv

So maybe you have some Urbit questions...

Let me start by sending my love to all Urbiters past and present: UF people, Tlon people, grant recipients and open-source contributors, planet holders, star and galaxy holders, and all friends and well-wishers

And especially to Galen, Josh and Ted, who have really poured their souls into this project. I love all three of you! It’s my baby and it’s your baby too and we’re going to make it work

While Tlon isn’t Urbit, Tlon’s CEO Galen (~ravmel-ropdyl) has spent ten years bringing Urbit from my garage to the world. And he’s not done yet. Urbit is a beautiful operating system with a beautiful human experience on a beautiful network

Tlon is not beauty in the abstract. It is a specific style. It is Galen’s style. His neo-Bauhaus aesthetic permeates the system. Without Galen, Urbit is just another Github codebase

When Galen and I were at Tlon, what we really needed and didn’t have was a guy like Josh (~wolref-podlex): a project manager to his bones. You know a manager by the loyalty he inspires. Without a Josh, a team of geniuses is just another misfit farm

I was so excited when Ted (~rovnys-ricfer) came on board in… 2016? Frankly, we’d never hired anyone with a resume that hard. He came from a company that sliced and scanned human bodies. Or something. Also MIT. He started slicing up our code and never stopped

I could go on and on. I could crash Elon’s servers. Urbit has brought together all these incredible people who know the future of computing isn’t just digital serfs on some bigco’s content farm. Some build in it, some live in it, some love it from afar. I love you all

And I need to apologize for all this "Game of Thrones" stuff. Public conversations are better than private conversations. Private conversations are better than private faits accomplis

Urbit has this wonderful mix of governance forms from the private sector, the open-source world, and (in the great American tradition) larping the Roman Republic

Democracy, oligarchy and monarchy, all three Aristotelian forms, widest to narrowest, are all present. We found ourselves in a tight spot and felt we had to act decisively in a narrow way. But

There's tons of stuff we wish we could do over again, and we made some really serious communication mistakes, and we've spent the past few days trying as hard as we can to fix that

It's become really clear that everyone in this wants the same thing and is ready to figure out how to make it happen

The Coindesk story is pretty good: coindesk.com/tech/2024/08/2…

I do want to make one correction: the story portrays our "Mayflower" plan as a final decision we're moving ahead on. Actually it's going to take a bit more consultation with the community, the Senate, and Tlon

In both crypto and system software, unity is everything. We know we harshed the Urbit vibe. We hate that. We wish we'd done it better. We're reaching out in every direction to make it right

It’s no wonder people find it hard to understand Urbit. Urbit is actually two things. Urbit is an operating system and Urbit is a network society

Urbit as a society is “Azimuth”: this space of four billion sovereign, decentralized, impersonal “planet” names. Like my name, ~sorreg-namtyv

Everywhere you go with your Urbit name is Urbit. It’s not about the technology. It’s about the society. A society is a network of names

The mission of the Foundation is to nurture this new society as it becomes the whole world. Think of the Urbit namespace (“Azimuth”) as a new uninhabited continent to settle

Our mission is to give every responsible adult on earth an Urbit planet: your own private acre in this new America, where you own and control both your own identity and your own computing. (Kids, robots, etc, get Urbit moons)

Times have changed. Ten years ago it was incredibly hard to explain why everyone needs their own digital sovereignty. Now it’s incredibly easy

But building a decentralized purely functional operating system (“Arvo”) for the whole world is still incredibly hard

That’s why we’re making this course change. We don’t want Urbit, the decentralized society, to have to wait for Urbit, the decentralized operating system

And we don’t want to have to rush Urbit, the OS, to catch up with Urbit, the society. You don’t rush an OS. It’s a hardwood tree. It has to grow straight and clear-grained and tall

That’s not saying OS development should be slow. It should never be slow. It should always be fast. “Festina lente,” the Italians say. Yes, Arvo development has been too slow. It’s also been too rushed

The problem is that Urbit, the society, has been gated on Urbit, the decentralized OS. That’s just the wrong order of operations. So we’ve been rushing the OS to drive the society

Urbit is two things. It’s decentralized identity and decentralized computing. Decentralized identity is needed now. Decentralized computing is the future. But decentralized identity doesn’t have to wait for decentralized computing

We’re going to develop Azimuth as if Arvo didn’t exist. And we’re going to develop Arvo as if Azimuth didn’t have to wait for it. And we’re all going to make it

It’s actually utterly mindblowing how real Arvo is. And it’s not like Arvo is going badly. The “neo-Urbit” updates to the app model, networking, and interpreter are transformative, almost done, and in the true Urbit spirit

As a system software architect I was long aware that there is something special about spreadsheets. No one in CS grad school cared about them. The idea that there is no such thing as an “application,” just a collection of active data components—that’s “Shrubbery"

Frankly... I'm not sure about the name. But it doesn’t matter. The question is: does it change your whole experience of using a computer to abandon the whole idea of an “app”? Yes. Yes it does. You laugh! “Laugh while you can, monkey-boy”

People—idiots—monkeys, really—have long denigrated Urbit for its performance. Yes. This is true. This is because Nock still runs on a 32-bit VM I designed as a prototype in 2007. Nock, like a RISC CPU, is easy to run and hard to optimize

Optimizing Nock is like optimizing Javascript. You take a typeless language, find the types at runtime, and turn soft S-expressions into hard data structures. This is “subject knowledge analysis.” It is not CS rocket science but it ain’t easy either

Arvo is also dinged for its network performance. When every packet is an event log transaction… but with just a little cleverness, we can make every *message* a transaction: “directed messaging.” Hello, gigabits

All this is “neo-Urbit.” And the next UI built by Tlon (the original Urbit company, ofc) is also beautiful and transformative. All this great stuff is about to drop and I can’t wait

But Urbit was made to take the long view. It’s a hundred-year operating system. It’s fully grown and it’s still a teenager. It works but we haven’t yet seen it scale

And it’s still way technically easier to build a centralized social experience than a decentralized social experience. Even though we know the drawbacks all too well

That’s why we’re going to build a new, easier path for developing Urbit apps. Developers will start with decentralized identity and *centralized* web servers. Once an app takes off, it’ll smoothly migrate to decentralized Arvo servers

To do this we’ll build a single-signon layer so you can use your new Web3 sovereign identity on a classic Web2 server. Once you have an Urbit name, you’re on Urbit. You can have your own Arvo personal server. But you don’t need to

ENS is also taking off, and we’ll bridge the Urbit namespace to ENS. Your Urbit name becomes an ENS name you own permanently and never have to “renew”

Reputation and credentialing is also part of this solution. Opaque names with verified reputation and/or credentials are a killer app. Again, this starts centralized and becomes decentralized

Now, none of this replaces Arvo. The future isn’t just that you have a sovereign identity, but also a sovereign personal server

And eventually your personal server will run in a secure enclave. Not even your host in the cloud will be able to violate your privacy. This is digital nirvana. And boy do we need it

Unlinking Urbit, the society of Azimuth names, from Urbit, the network of Arvo servers, doesn’t mean we stop building Arvo servers or Tlon stops building an Arvo UI

Urbit is both Azimuth and Arvo. That will never change, and it’s the mission of the Foundation to support both. And in the long term Arvo is just way more work. You do the math

We’re still working out the organizational details of how we walk and chew gum at the same time. But anyone who tells you this is about the Urbit Foundation abandoning Arvo is full of something. It’s not gum

And we need to fix Urbit’s scarcity model. Limiting the supply of names makes spam resistance easy. But when the system is young, a limit of 4 billion doesn’t mean much

That worked in the 2021 cycle when anything Web3 went to the moon. This cycle is more discerning. It prizes realness. The real will inherit the moon

If settling Urbit is like settling North America in 1624, maybe Massachusetts is enough. We don’t want users to be too outnumbered by potential bots. The party always starts in the kitchen

But not everyone has the same power to see reality. The conformist masses need to be led to the future by the rebel pioneers. If you’re reading this that’s probably you

So I think we need a new scarcity system in which the supply of planets corresponds to the expected demand over time. That’s the essence of the “Mayflower” plan. We’re still consulting with all the stakeholders in the community and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s final

In the longer term, the question of whether Urbit needs its own chain is very much open. Our friends at Zorp are doing incredible work with a Nock-based ZK proof chain, based on proof of work. But the idea of doing BFT with galaxies as validators is also obvious

Proof of work, value of land, and proof of stake/authority may all have roles to play. We’ll solve these problems as we come to them. What’s clear is: you’ll be able to get a planet on chain

Finally, I know a lot of people are worried about something else: my other life in which I’m a controversial public figure. (But no, I am NOT the secret mastermind behind JD Vance. Lol jfc)

Not only am I not here to politicize Urbit, I’m here to depoliticize it. Urbit has to be universal. It can’t win if it’s a polarized society like Bluesky or Gab

Whatever you think of my reputation, it makes it easy not to be Bluesky. Those kinds of political people will just not show up. As for not being Gab, that’s about selection in private spaces and curation in public spaces

In today’s frighteningly politicized world, a safe space is an apolitical space. Politics is a weapon and you need to leave it at the door if you want a drink at this saloon

The right vibe for an apolitical space is that you can talk about anything, even current events, but without ranting or canceling or preaching at all. Ultimately it’s just about being polite

Hacker News is the space that comes closest to this vibe. I think we can do even better. Of course, it's a decentralized network and this is only a culture. But culture matters

In closing, I’m tremendously honored by the incredible development of Urbit while I was away, and all the amazing people who have gotten into it as developers and creators and users

Maybe it’s a cliche but I’ll say it anyway: the real Urbit is the friends we made along the way. I know Urbit will win for one big reason: I have never met a boring person who was into Urbit. Not one

Thank you and I love you all! By the way: I’ll be back on Urbit this Friday at 6pm. Everyone cool will be there. We’re making a list. We’re checking it twice. Hint hint