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jakejnichols23 karma

Why will the first 5,000 people use Urbit? I can understand (in theory) why Urbit would be super cool if it got broadly adopted. But what is in it for the early adopters? Why is it worth it for early users to pay the cost of adopting an alien software platform?

jakejnichols6 karma

Cool. I am a tech early adopter who is very concerned about owning my own data, and am very willing to try products to help solve this problem. What problem exactly can Urbit solve for me? Right now, I've moved to keeping all my data and notes in SpiderOak, which does zero-knowledge encrypted syncing and backup. So I already feel like I am mostly in control and ownership of my own data. Email is still a problem, but I don't want the pain of running my own email server. Facebook I'm stuck on because all my friends are there. I'd like a secure-by-default, self-hosted alternative to Slack, but it seems like then all non-techies in the group would also have to run their own Urbit instances? Seems easier just to use an open source slack clone. Can you sell me on becoming an early adopter of Urbit (not necessarily now, but whenever it is ready)?

jakejnichols4 karma

Well, I am still focused on the early adopter stage. And I understand that Urbit is designed to be way more secure, stable, and maintainable than linux -- but will that be the case for the early adopters? Won't there be buffer overflows in the underlying C-code? Won't there be bugs that make the whole thing crash? Boneheaded mistakes in some library that cause data loss or corruption? Usually with a new product there needs to be a very large benefit in order for users to want to deal with the inevitable bugs and friction of being an early adopter. I'm still not sold on that benefit yet.

jakejnichols3 karma

Why would you rather run an app that only syncs when you tell it to as opposed to having an app that always syncs all the time provided it's equally easy to do so?

A desktop app or script can indeed run all the time. An app can run as a mac helper app and sync in the background.

Despite the terms of service, you don't functionally own that data, SpiderOak does.

A full copy of the data lives on my laptop. They do not have the encryption key. If they get hacked, the data is gibberish. If they go away, or go out of business, I just find another syncing service, no problem. I guess if they really wanted to, they could secretly have their desktop client forward them my encryption key, but I'm not trying to protect against the NSA, I have zero reason to think SpiderOak would try to break their promises in that way.

If it was equally easy and secure to use Urbit to keep my stuff in sync that might be appealing. But the proof-is-in-the-pudding on that one -- I'll have to wait and see if Urbit can create a server that is fundamentally unhackable and fundamentally stable.

jakejnichols3 karma

Suppose you want to post one of your notes on SpiderOak to Facebook? Suppose you wanted your Facebook updates to autosync to SpiderOak?

This is isn't a big problem for me right now. If I was trying to solve this kind of thing, I'd probably look for a Mac app running on my hard drive, to sync between Facebook and my local desktop. I think there is an app out there that will do that for photos. The idea of running a simple desktop app appeals to me more than the idea of running and securing a cloud server.