Tlon is a startup, a classic corporate structure, if you will — ‘urbit’ is a protocol, and already operated under a number of structures — I’m aware of at least a handful of network infrastructure being run under cooperative ownership, with one group in particular actually situating the ownership of a single star as cryptographically-cooperatively owned, if you are aware of what a multisig wallet entails:
While the hierarchical nature of the networking infrastructure is made immediately legible, the nodes in and of themselves can literally be owned by an arbitrary number of people, a case the dalten group outlines in a small way. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a single node’s (a star) children nodes (planets) from each maintaining collective ownership and management of a star.
Frankly, there’s really nothing stopping individuals from completely shrugging off the network hierarchy and choosing to run their urbits in the forest, locally networked with their friends.
Aren’t there a lot of other ways to do such things already? I’m trying to understand Urbit’s specificity in this matter as a protocol. But maybe don’t answer me now. I’ll go and find more about it tomorow and read people’s opinions here.
It’s too bad for such an ambitious and suposedly game-changing project that you use an old capital related start up structure to build the platform, seems to go completely against any “anarchist” (whatever this word may mean to you, I personally find it weird to not consider it a leftist word) ideal or impulse you might have had initially. I feel like if the company was to really prove how it’s moved past anything disgusting its founder might believe in, instead of shrugging it off like it’s nothing, overhauling the entire structure of “how it’s made” would be the first and most crucial step to help people make sense out of this.
But I’ll just check more about this and the alternatives this week and come back more informed.
I was under the impression the star/planet virtual real estate was intentionally scarce? Wouldn’t this limit the type of choice you are suggesting is possible?
urbit is quite a bit livelier than it used to be. not affiliated, but i wanted to share https://imperceptible.computer/ for those that feel like trying it out. i got my planet through justin and it’s fun browsing the community stuff. i guess you folks would like https://www.door.link/ (~natnex-ronret/door-link/ on urbit)
update: seems like free urbit planets are off the table for a while. network has been growing and needs some adjustments accordingly. you can still boot up a comet for free and check things out though.