[belisarius222]

Urbit only uses a blockchain as a ledger of who owns which addresses within the network and root DNS for peer discovery.

The OS itself runs as a VM on your machine (either a Linux or MacOS host, for now), and that is the only place your data lives.

Urbit does implement a peer-to-peer encrypted, authenticated network among these VMs. It's not solely socially focused, though.

It's also intended to be your personal archive for things like your personal financial data, pictures, nusic, notes, and private documents like tax records and medical histories.

And not only an archive, but also your personal "agent", in the sense that it's a program that's on all the time, on the network on your behalf, to serve your blog, for example.

You can access Urbit through the command-line or a webpage that it serves for you.

The state of an Urbit VM is a folder on the host OS. You can zip it up, move it to another computer, and restart it there seamlessly.

None of these features by themselves is particularly interesting. What's unique about Urbit is that all of this is accomplished using a very small set of primitives, making it easier to write applications that don't go through some huge company that tracks your every move and has a conflict of interest between serving you and serving advertisers.

If you're interested in learning more details of how it works, there is actually quite a bit of technical documentation at https://urbit.org/docs

We're obviously still trying to figure out how to describe this thing. It doesn't occupy a slot that people already have in their minds for a piece of software, except maybe "personal server", but even that is somewhat vague.

Because there's a different world of computing inside Urbit, with its own libraries, apps, languages, etc., it can take a while to wrap your head around.

What's funny about this is that the Urbit world is orders of magnitude simpler than a standard Unix-based stack. We've just spent so much time learning things like DNS A records vs. CNAMEs and what 'xzvf' do for tar, that a parallel universe of these constructs seems bewildering again.

[p1esk]

The best way to describe it is to tell us why we would want to use it. Also, don't say "it's a computer". It's not. A computer is what I'm typing this on - a piece of hardware.

So - why would I want to use Urbit? Which problems does it solve? How will it make my life easier? Does it have any features that will make me say "wow, this is so cool!"

[belisarius222]

I do work for Tlon, if that wasn't obvious. I also find the "computer" terminology misleading, so I'm with you on that.

Why would you want to use Urbit? The same reasons you want to use the modern consumer internet, which Urbit intends to pave over and replace with something better.

How is Urbit better? Because you'll have all your data and programs on one machine, which you control, using an open source operating system. You can build a peer-to-peer twitter or facebook clone on Urbit in a day or two, because the OS handles more of the distributed systems and identity problems that have killed most peer-to-peer projects in the past.

It's still in alpha, so it's a bit slow and buggy, and a lot more work has been put into kernelspace than userspace so far. What will make you way "wow this is cool" varies widely, but some good candidates are: - an internet experience not predicated on surveillance capitalism - no ads - control over your UI - a minimal aesthetic - interesting people to talk to on the network - lack of the twitter "thunderdome" feel - if you like to write programs, the Urbit system is fascinating to work with; I've learned a lot more CS from working on it

The other thing that's cool is that this new world isn't yet fully settled. You can write a little talkbot or something and still have a big effect on the culture.