Armed with the new tool of formats, we are designing the structure and semantics of your future Urbit(tm) brand personal cloud server, from first principles. All we know is that the state of your digital life is one well-formed noun.

(See start of thread series: )

https://x.com/sorreg_namtyv/status/1963005657856217363

It seems proper to start with the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. We set aside fire, which is nondeterminism. Urbit is deterministic and abhors fire. This leaves three layers: solid, liquid, and gas

One of my many intentional mistakes when originally building Urbit was that, when building the userspace data layer, I was very conservative.

Urbit is a stack and building the stack took a long time (a decade). By the top, I did not feel I had a lot of time Knowing that I did not know anything about the application layer in a purely-functional single-level store, I built “%gall agents,” the current state of the art. A %gall agent is basically a cross between the actor and Unix process models

Scaling decentralized systems is difficult because everything turns into n^2. Staying in centralized systems is undesirable because everything turns into a government agency. How can we trade off these two unsolvable problems? A new generation of semi-decentralized protocols, like Bluesky and Farcaster, have balanced these two pressures in interesting ways

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