14 KiB
Executable File
Urbit is still basically just a glorified chatroom
published: 2022-08-06
preparing for launch
According to Wikipedia, Urbit is a "decentralized personal server platform." It seeks to "deconstruct the client-server model in favour of a federated network of personal servers in a peer-to-peer network with a consistent digital identity." In other words, it's a piece of software you run on your computer that supposedly lets you communicate and share data without the need for a server that's online 24/7 or a static IP. Going on the project homepage immediately hits any visitor over the head with a ton of cruft about DAOs, however, so it is clear from the get-go that this isn't a replacement for something like ZeroNet but instead a web3 project with a paywall.
As I stated a few posts ago, the apparently inherent paywall requirement of web3 projects excludes low-income and other disenfranchised people who don't have additional money to spend on getting into these citadels. Unlike other web3 projects, however, an identity on Urbit seems to be a one-time purchase (as I will detail later) instead of requiring tokens to fund every action taken on the network, and being a part of the network doesn't require hosting a local copy of a gigantic and computation-heavy blockchain. In addition, owners of "stars" can issue 216 "planets" each and either sell them or give them away to, ahem, broke dumbasses like yours truly.
I got an Urbit planet out of the blue from a man I used to be internet friends with back in 2019. I was kind of an ass to him, but there was an understanding at the time that most of it was just joking and banter. I eventually ended up cutting off contact with him because he had given me admin permissions over his XMPP group chat and I had taken it upon myself to ban a "coomer" who was constantly putting simulated CSAM in the chat and sexually harassing me in DMs. Said "friend" kept adding the coomer back despite my protestations, so, disgusted, I decided that my mental health was more important than maintaining what little of the friendship remained at that point.
Apparently nowadays he LARPs as a gross stereotype of a woman and spends his entire online presence fetishizing lesbians, so whatever guilt I felt for calling him cringe for being an Urbit fanatic instantly dissipated.
For whatever reason, although I had no intentions of ever using it again, I kept my Urbit passport, two JPEGs containing my "master ticket" and "management phrase". When cleaning out the downloads folder on my phone a few months ago, I discovered that it was still there, sitting at the top of the file listing. And hey, it's been three years... so surely Urbit is now more than just a nonsensical terminal, right?
blasting off
Getting on Urbit isn't always easy, either. The onboarding process hasn't been optimized by product managers in search of maximal profit. There's no checkbox for your interests—you have to discover them yourself.
You mean... onboarding hasn't been made easy for non-technical people? The same people all these grand overtures of "escaping from MEGACORP" are supposed to save? Or is this one of those "citadel" projects where all the benefit is for the early adopters safe inside and the masses are supposed to be locked outside to suffer whatever computing apocalypse will come?
Urbit has a free version of an identity called a "comet", but apparently it can't download any apps or interact with much of the network, which is confusingly later contradicted in the CLI install instructions: "There are currently few differences between using a comet-level identity and a planet-level one." To do anything of substance, you'll "need a to get a planet". Because I already had my Urbit passport from three years ago, the post doesn't end here, and I was able to continue my research without spending any money. Otherwise, judging from the recommended planet resellers that were functional, prices for a Layer 2 planet range from about $15 to $50, which isn't an "I am now destitute and living on the streets" amount of money... but still, that's a lot of groceries.
The desktop GUI, according to the documentation, requires snap to be installed, but some digging reveals there are also .dpkg packages and raw binaries... which, par for the course of web3 bullshit, are written in Node.js. However, these seem to only be available for x86_64, unless you're using a Mac, in which case you also get arm64, or a Raspberry Pi, in which case you get shunted to a a third-party solution. You could also attempt to compile it yourself, but given the aforementioned Node.js dependency, you're more likely to see the sun explode tomorrow than get the damn thing to compile properly.
Because I wasn't sure how much bandwidth Urbit would use, even though I have a Wi-Fi repeater in my bedroom now and thus an actually decent connection, I instead opted for the server install, which entails downloading a shady-looking CLI binary and feeding it a keyfile... which supposedly comes with the passport, but mine didn't have one, and the setup instructions make it too easy to accidentally skip over the part where you can redownload said keyfile at bridge.urbit.org in the "OS" menu at the bottom of the page.
It took what felt like forever (at least ten minutes; I timed it) to get to a prompt after running ~/urbit/urbit -p 57323 -w socleb-fosrut -k ./socleb-fosrut.key. The web interface, the port to run on specified with the -p option, completely ignored this argument and instead decided to run on port 8081, which thankfully wasn't claimed by any other process at the time. You still need the CLI running in a separate window, though, because you'll need to run +code in the "dojo" (Urbit speak for the CLI) to generate a code to log in to the web interface.
On first run, there are only three options in the web UI: "Terminal", "Groups", and "Bitcoin". I tried Terminal first. It appeared that whatever I typed into it was immediately mirrored in the CLI window. I typed help thinking it would give me a list of commands like it does in Bash, but instead I got the nonsensical string <1.lqz [* <232.hhi 51.qbt 123.ppa 46.hgz 1.pnw %140>]>. (At least it has an angel number...?)
Unintuitively, "installing" more apps means opening the search bar instead of a dedicated "install" button (even a little plus sign would have been more helpful) and pasting in a long unmemorable string from an external app directory that has right-clicking disabled, just like the Urbit project blog I sifted through to try to get more information on how the project had grown over the past three years. (There are only so many times I can right-click a tab and duplicate it before I give up out of frustration.) The web UI provides neither app discovery nor progress on app installation: all logs instead get output to the CLI window, and the web UI just gives the web3 equivalent of a middle finger with an endlessly-spinning wheel icon. Once I got some apps installed, I attempted to interact with them:
~dister-norsyr-torryn/canvas: Like r/place, but stupider. I definitely had A Time vandalizing a few doodles on the preinstalled public canvas. I wouldn't call it a "fun" time... just A Time.- There's a notes app, which I showed some initial interest in, but the only frontend is for... iOS.
~magped-magped-rabsef-bicrym/wrdu: I don't play Wordle, but I got the general gist of the game pretty quickly. I got three green letters and then lost, but the app didn't tell me what the winning word was.~tirrel/studio: Took forever to install. It requires you make a "notebook" first, but it doesn't show where to do that. It also requires a clearnet domain to mirror to.~dister-nocsyx-lassul/sphinx: It required me to install another app in order to have "friends". I added the star ID of the person I got the Urbit planet from and returned to Sphinx, but still nothing showed up. I left it alone and then returned to it about a week later, but still nothing had appeared in the feed.~dister-fabnev-hinmur/escape: This is the titular chat app. A small handful of popups directed me to some rooms that, from the chat history, appeared to have a small handful of active users. Emphasis on small. I sent a few test messages, but nobody responded to me. Presumably most of the users had hidden themselves away in non-default groups, none of which I bothered joining because... I mean, if I wanted to talk to random techbros, I'd just boot up any old IRC client, no blockchain required.
There is a static site app, but the files inside of it don't seem accessible from inside Urbit itself, instead using the user's "pier" (the Urbit storage) to serve on the clearnet. (That is what I could glean from the sparse documentation.) At least, that seems to be the intention, as the clearnet gateway timed out when I tried it. At that point, one could just install any web server instead and get better results.
> exit -find.exit dojo: hoon expression failed > quit -find.quit dojo: hoon expression failed > bye -find.bye dojo: hoon expression failed
Turns out "|exit" or Ctrl-D is the "get me the hell out of here" key combo.
coming back down to earth
I'm not interested in a convoluted chat app to talk with complete strangers, much less the kind of "techbros" that are attracted to web3 like moths to a lamp or flies to candy. I already have DecSync for decentralized calendars and an increasingly convoluted web of devices running Syncthing for my notebook. And I can just open the Firefox Klar shortcut on my phone's homescreen for the weather... or, you know, look outside my bedroom window. (I need to go outside more often. Stupid humidity, making me wilt at even the slightest bit of sweat... Ah, the joys of having sensory issues.)
I don't see the point of any "alternative Internet" project that doesn't allow me to share my writing in some form. Hell, even Secure Scuttlebutt allows for in-network website hosting, albeit broken last time I tried. The closest thing to Urbit's promise of a "personal server platform" with a "consistent digital identity" that actually functions without the paywall is ZeroNet, but just as Urbit is hamstrung by the utter insanity of the "Hoon" and "Nock" programming languages, ZeroNet is held back by its lack of documentation and spaghetti-tier Python code, both of which make it diffcult for programmers to contribute new applications to their respective platforms. Which is a shame. The idea of being able to host one's entire Internet presence, with private keys and being able to run on (nearly) any computer anywhere, is quite attractive to me.
While I admit Urbit holds a lot of promise, and a lot of effort has been made to smooth out the technological rough edges that often prevent non-technical users from using "alternative Internet" projects, the apps required to replace many of the functions of Urbit's self-proclaimed enemy "MEGACORP" in the eyes of "normies" simply aren't there yet. I see no shared file storage or long-form mailing system or website hosting or even just a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/whatever-social-media clone. Unlike ZeroNet, Urbit doesn't seem resilient in the face of intermittent connections to the outside world or situations where one has access to other peers inside the LAN but not outside. In the face of the looming climate crisis and the computing challenges that will no doubt accompany it, Urbit seems needlessly fragile, too little too late.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander