Yes it was over complicated, at its core Urbit had a good idea though; it is too complex for people to run their own servers because securing Linux is hard, and it is not safe to install applications from untrusted sources, both of which forces centralisation.
So they wanted to make an operating system that is secure and user friendly... but they really over complicated things.
Peergos is much closer to what should have been done.
Honestly, chances of a new OS to chatch on are pretty slim. I think something like a soft-layer/psudo os using the infrastructure we already have, might close to reality.
I too am into wasm, but the wasm ecosystem it's still young and not yet well standardized.
There is pointnetwork, same as urbit, they went to rewrite the internet :) and they keep adding things.
Changing such core things like the os is pretty hard, my feeling is by adding an os (pseudo) on top of any current os might be simpler and feasible.
---- sidenote ----
What I find a bit funny is that all these promises and all the sovereignity and everything, we still put the code on github.
Urbit and every similar thing is an OS in the same way that browsers are OSs, more like virtual machines or sandboxes or whatever you want to call them, they are specifc ways to isolate programs while still allowing them to mutate a state somewhere.
Arguably Google Drive and the collaborative apps built on them are an operating system.
If you keep the definition tight and conventional; a layer between software and hardware, then that is not what Urbit or anyone similar is trying to do.
Although I know someone actually working on wasm based honest to God OS, but that is not what I am interested in.
I am interested in stuff like Peergos.
My point is, this emergent system will exist regardless, either inside a walled garden like Google or Proton Drive, or hopefully more standardised, and the reason is simple, the web was supposed to be like that and the demand still is here, and if the web doesn't evolve to satisfy that, the cloud providers will remain the AOL of this era.
True, you are right. I might be reading too much into what OS meaning.
What are some problems with peergos, other than the obvious, just curious.
Regarding the walled gardens vs privacy and standardisation, isn't the solid project exactly what you describing?
That protocol in theory should help you do exactly that: build whatever apps on top of data. I had several attempts with it but its vastness is straight up disarming
Solid is designed by alot of people at once, and as expected it is very underpowered, barely any better than WebDav, it has no sovereign identity and data is not encrypted at use, meaning unless you run your own Pod, your host can see everything.
Peergos is great and honestly so very close to the optimal, but it also didn't start with sovereign identity, relying on a centralised PKI, although they plan to mend that, and I don't like that it runs in web browsers for no reason really, and the only way to build apps for it is to build web apps.
Finally Peergos currently has too much latency for my liking and I suspect I will never know if this is a fundamental price of excessive privacy, or an implemtation detail unless I implement some parts of it in Rust and see how fast i can get it to work.
Another thing about Peergos is that it puts so much effort into being p2p friendly with IPFS baggage and complexity that is only needed for people to be able to host random parts of your data in a p2p... I personally think all of that baggage is not helpful... no one uses peergos in a p2p manner nor they ever will.
So the question is how much simpler can we get if we remove all of that Protocol Labs stuff.
I like it. But before going into codding too much would be better to have a scope defined first? Something like.
1. What is what we want to achive?
2. Some example - these details you exposed here for example are pretty good.
3. How does, in general terms, the ecosystem will look like?
Idk, few lines explaining the whole idea/goal.
In general, I think I got the gist of it, but some sort of document to follow alone would be great.
As for github, I don't see a problem with that, global discovery and indexing is an impossible problem to solve in a decentralised way, and I am fine with github winning there.
Anyone who needs a credible exit from Github can have it, and with interoperable identity the friction of jumping into someone's gitlab and contributing would be super simple, so you only lose discoverability and exposure on github main page timeline thing, but no one owes you that.
