As annoying and ill-formed as your takes usually are, the central point of this one seems correct to me. Using an in-group reference on a page designed to onboard new people is probably ineffective, so thanks. We've removed that.
You've given zero justification for this assertion. Pointing to the years-absent founder's background and your personal speaking relationship with him (?), whom none of the people that worked on the content in the OP have EVER worked with, sounds like a straw man. At the very least it's lame reasoning.
Your central point is "A is a cult, because X is a characteristic of cults and A has X characteristic, therefore A is a cult." By that reasoning, all domains that have a need to use precise language to describe their concepts are cults. Like physics. Quark? Definitely a cult.
We shipped a proper mechanism for software distribution last October. If you haven't booted up since then you might want to. Discovery still requires word of mouth (but not for long...), but sharing them is now as simple as sharing a link in chat or punching something like the following into the Dojo.
|install ~dister-norsyr-torryn %canvas
edit: yes, there's an ecosystem of developers shipping software now. Here's a screenshot of my homescreen, which I cleaned up a couple of days ago to remove some apps I don't use often: https://imgur.com/7keFr7Y
Of the apps you can see, 13 were created by distinct developers. Some people are more prolific.
It has enough users to be useful now, which number in the thousands. It's also not a service that anyone maintains on behalf of others, so there's no one that needs to have a critical mass for it to be useful. Nearly everyone running Urbit is self-hosting locally or on some VPS somewhere, and they can do that indefinitely even if no more code was ever pushed.
If this kind of stuff made anyone want to throw in the towel Urbit wouldn't be a thing anymore. There's only a millstone around its neck on HN, but HN is gradually becoming more and more irrelevant. To our base and the people finding us, "I don't think about you at all" reflects their sentiment for HN conversations and the tenor of conversation that happens here.
I'm just here because someone told me (from within Urbit) that this post went up, it's Friday and I don't have as many meetings, and I couldn't resist myself. You seem fine though, so boot a comet and hit me up on the network if you want a planet or something to keep the conversation going.
Ideas are cheap, and Urbit isn't just an idea any longer. It's a working system that's been built by dozens of people over the years, and it's only picking up steam.
In Ron Garrett's words:
> The mere fact that Urbit is still a thing, that it has not yet collapsed under the weight of its own intentionally induced baggage, is worrisome to me. Something is keeping that project alive, and it's not technical merit. I don't see a lot of viable options other than some kind of fanaticism.
Looks like he and his ilk are just wrong and having a hard time believing that. It's alive because an increasing number of people want it to be, and no amount of theorizing can deny the reality of actual growth — which, in case everyone forgot, is what the OP is showing.
> An especially admirable thing about the way Garrett has approached this mess is that he's managed, as far as I can tell, to reliably avoid taking the bait on the drama about the project's founder...
Well, your link shows that this statement is false:
> ...But Curtis is more than just a bad reinventor of things. He is also Mencius Moldbug, a prolific pseudo-intellectual influencer of the alt-right. His politics worry me much more than his coding style. And because of my personal dealings with him, I am not sanguine about his ability or that of his followers to separate the two.
It clearly colors his thinking, as he admits, to some degree.
For anyone out there that's not content outsourcing their views to a mob with a bone to pick:
Urbit is not intentionally obfuscated. It's intentionally different from the rest of the modern software stack, because that's the point. It makes sense that that would make it look obfuscated. There are claims out there that it was in fact intentionally obfuscated years ago in its early days as its founder's personal project. Maybe? Not sure. Regardless, things change and this project is over a decade old.
If you find the state of discourse here off-putting, malicious, and obviously ideological, like I do, and would rather see for yourself, I'm happy to onboard you to Urbit personally for free and show you what it's actually about.
Follow our Getting Started guide (https://urbit.org/getting-started), boot a comet for free, and send ~wolref-podlex a DM, and I'll get you a planet.
Funnily enough, most of the "mystique" isn't really intentional. It's that the inevitable "muh Curtis" arguments that always show up have discouraged many of the team from bothering to engage in explaining the project (here moreso than anywhere else) and instead focus on building the thing.
Summarization: Urbit is a reaction to Unix-driven software complexity that dominates modern software development. The thesis is that cascading complexity cannot be solved without a complete rewrite of the computing stack, and that goes all the way back to the operating system. Here's an even better summarization: https://twitter.com/pcmonk/status/1201298411011629063
Alternative summarization: the internet, being built on a hodgepodge stack of tooling that wasn't made for people to communicate the way that they actually do now, has major incidental flaws. Urbit is a completely rebuilt computing stack that better maps to what we want to do with networked computers. That involves things like, but not limited to baking a non-fungible, valuable identity into the networking layer.
I don't know who "centimeter" is and never claimed to agree with their viewpoints, so I'm not sure what the other viewpoint is that you're referring to.
The Chinese language looks extremely arcane to me, but that doesn't make it so. Quantum computing is pretty arcane-seeming too. Urbit probably seems arcane to those that know nothing about and haven't invested the time to learn. Fortunately, the docs are very good[1] and updated frequently[2]. They're also publicly available and lots of people[3] are working pretty hard to make them understandable.
Urbit is really welcoming to everyone, should they take a moment to ask about it. Here's[4] where you can find out how to get in and get set up. Here's a place where, earlier today, I offered a free planet to someone that asked[5]. And here's[6] what ended up happening.