Stories from the broader Urbit community, the Urbit Foundation, and the many people contributing to Urbit.
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When building the Combine DAO, we conducted a survey of DAO governance and tooling and came to the conclusion that the many theoretical approaches to the problem of governance were tied to the implementation details of the DAO stack. Since we were building everything on Urbit—as opposed to through the typical combination of Solidity contracts, Web2 tools and Snapshot—we realized that we’d have to do some rethinking. A new approach for a new stack.
Homes are getting smarter. A smart home is no longer just a collection of smart devices but a superorganism of data-collecting objects. These people and devices who use and inhabit these homes form a complex socio-technical system. What is the future of the smart home and how will Urbit fit into it?
Using Urbit ID’s pseudonymous reputation model, DAO participants know Urbit ID holders’ past behavior before relying on them, and without sacrificing anonymity.
Inside the mind of the Combine
Like the relationships that we build within them, our platforms should yield satisfaction precisely because they’re non-trivial; they demand effort, which is another way of saying they require engagement with the world.
As more DAOs, NFT and digital communities find their way to Urbit, others are likely to follow their paths, making them their own, just like the network itself.
A consideration of the history of the Internet motivates introspection on the nature and causes of social dysfunction in a globally shared space. Centralized solutions fail to yield satisfactory outcomes for human freedom and thriving. Decentralized autonomous organizations and their technological apparatus together represent the evolution of an immune system against a corporatized Internet.
Answers to all your lingering L2 questions.
Urbit is for creators who are ready to wake up from this bad dream.
The system builds the community and the community builds the system.
Is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a 'decentralization sandwich?'
An interview with the founder of Holdersland
Interview with the founder of UrbitHost ~lavlyn-litmeg
A brief history of hypertext and Urbit networking
Galactic Senate makes first concrete action
How we're making Urbit ID affordable again
Interview with The Portico founder Josh Reagan
Potential future use cases of moons for industry and consumers
The date is January 1, 2050. The place, New York City. The vibe...subdued.
Building things, even Calm™ things, makes noise.
Ames’ design has unparalleled potential to deter, mitigate, and recover from attacks, since every packet is authenticated and encrypted and backed by a stable, decentralized PKI.
On the upcoming and foregoing Landscape lifecycles, and other forms of mitosis across the Urbit project.
An update on our primary infrastructure milestones for 2020.
I found this email in my archives recently and thought it might be fun to share publicly.
Conversations compose society. What composes conversation — how do we digitize it in a way that enhances society without imposing upon it? How do we form this new medium, both to facilitate natural human behavior and to inspire the best of it?
One of the most exciting things about Urbit is the aesthetic and design around it, developed partly by Tlon (through the design of Urbit itself) and partly by the community (by producing great Urbit art).
These events are an opportunity for Urbit contributors to share real-time updates that don’t make it into this blog, and for the community to get to know the contributors (and one another).
The way we see it, hosting is the most important thing, next to Landscape, that Tlon can do to help Urbit continue toward widespread adoption.
When we announced OS 1, in April, we started to disappear into Urbit. Since then, we’ve been living on Urbit like we never have before.
Twice a year we distribute address space to those that have made valuable contributions to Urbit. Now called our Gifts program, the gifting of address space has been part of Urbit long before we had a grants program.
We’ve always assumed that providers would have to come into existence sooner or later. By the look of it, that time is now. Tlon and a few others have provider-like services in the works.
With a stable platform taking shape and a strong community forming that wants to help build Urbit, it’s time to make urbit.org real.
Ford Fusion was an overhaul of Urbit's over-the-air upgrade process and a rewrite of its build system. The new update system corrects a few long-standing bugs with the previous one, and the new build system is simpler, smaller (by around 5,000 lines), and easier to manage.
We recently held an invite-only Urbit Hackathon for graduates of our Hoon School program, and the submissions really impressed us across the board. Submissions were judged on several criteria: creativity, usefulness, and code quality.
Urbit stars can facilitate a flexible continuum of community norms.
What is a digital environment? What does it mean to shape your own digital environment?
Urbit is calm computing. Calm commerce follows naturally.
OS 1 is somewhere between ‘productivity software’ and a ‘social network’. We think it’s the beginning of an altogether new breed of social computing.
Scarcity, utility, liquidity, and network effect.
A reflection–meditation on OS 1’s initial form development, and the attitude we brought to bear in designing it.
An expansion of our position on Urbit's address space value.
An interview-based podcast series about the Urbit project, as told by those working on it.
Urbit is for giving communities the tools to shape their own environments; for us all to feel a sense of life and self-directedness in the digital world.
The precepts aren’t arguments. We discuss and justify them here.
Technical maxims that define Urbit's approach to engineering.
A layperson’s guide to the coming new internet.
The origin and design process informing Urbit's generative user avatar system, Sigils.
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for binding a set of keys to a name. Sometimes a small amount of metadata is included.
This year we set out to get Arvo to a point that we can credibly call ‘stable.'
The promise of Urbit lies in its reimagination of the digital world using components that are as constrained and limited as possible.
We built Urbit from scratch to be a system that’s simple, durable, and yours. Everything that computing today is not — but should be.
A sound money deserves a sound computer.
Your Urbit is a simpler computer, a quieter computer, a more private computer. We want it to feel predictable, safe, and reliable — things only a complete, sealed system can do. This, we hope, can get us a world where technology keeps us connected, but doesn’t dominate our lives.
Galen Wolfe-Pauly on the road ahead for the identity/OS/interface/community stack.
On the latest Urbit user interface, and the interfaces to come.
Announcing Urbit Grants, a way to earn stars through contributing.
Inviting you (and your friends) to help us make Azimuth as secure as possible.
Announcing an upcoming Urbit grants program and star gifts for Mid-2019.
Where we are and where we're going as of mid-2019.
What if everyone had a single 'civilizational key'?
An update on the state of Landscape and the Urbit network.
One way to think about Urbit: as a "100-year computer."
My goal was always to fire myself at the first possible opportunity. I'm super happy to reach it.
The Urbit address space, now called Azimuth, is on the blockchain. And too many other things to fit into a single post.
A bit about the 'idea maze' of choosing to bootstrap from Ethereum.
We've decided to launch Urbit's constitution as a system of Ethereum contracts.
Is it possible to freeze an entire OS?
Urbit's revision-control system, %clay, is itself due for a (medium-sized) revision!
Urbit (probably) doesn't need a blockchain, because the Urbit address-space PKI is a special case of a consensus ledger.
Some common objections to Urbit, discussed.
What's the right lesson for the decentralization community to learn from the collapse of the DAO?
The governing rules for the early days of the Urbit network.
A thought-experiment to explain the Urbit user experience.
An overview of Urbit's cryptographic address space.
We believe.