Urbit for Catholics - Get Freedom
Urbit for Catholics
Howdy this is Devin Rose with Lionheart Catholic.
Today I want to share with you a cool project that you as a Catholic should know about, called urbit.
Urbit is a peer-to-peer computer program that creates an operating system on top of the internet.
You set up your urbit on your own computer or a cloud computer (like Digital Ocean or AWS), and it can then talk to other people running the urbit program on their computers.
What Problem Does Urbit Solve?
The vast majority of stuff we do on the computer nowadays uses centralized apps and systems owned by companies, where all our data and interaction is at the whim of those big companies.
So, for instance, you make a facebook account, and facebook adds you to some rows in their databases and begins collecting information about you as you use facebook: who your friends are, groups that you join, posts that you like.
Same goes for your twitter, which isn't really yours, and your youtube channel, and your instagram, and everything else you use.
With urbit though, you own the computer that you run your urbit on, and all the data is on that computer, and you can take that data and move it to a different computer anytime you want.
Urbit is its own ecosystem of fiefdoms, where every person using it owns their own little castle and talks to other castles.
What Can Urbit Do?
Urbit is primarily a chat app right now, where you can make groups centered around interests ("people who like soccer") or organizations ("members of the southeast Texas bass-fishing alliance") and you can chat with people (similar to Slack or Discord).
But people are developing apps that run on urbit--urbit native apps--that will allow you to live more and more of your virtual online life inside of urbit, and thus inside of your own castle.
A bitcoin app has already been written, so you could pay other people in urbit using bitcoin.
Many of the apps used in the regular web could also be written to work within urbit: think Patreon, Calendar apps, note-taking apps, productivity apps, games.
Currently we use chat apps that allow big tech companies to spy on our communications and mine out data from them. Much better to use urbit for such communications.
How Does Urbit Work?
Urbit is organized structurally into galaxies, stars, and planets.
Galaxies and stars are infrastructure and governance nodes that help planets discover one another and route system updates.
Planets are the primary way that people use urbit.
You obtain a planet and that is your identity as you use urbit on your computer.
The planet is the equivalent of the "castle" that I mentioned above, just a different set of imagery.
The planet can either be an Ethereum NFT, which is what mine is, or it can be a so-called "Layer 2" planet that, for efficiency's sake, exists primarily within urbit but does have a roll-up transaction to the Ethereum blockchain.
The point is, your planet identity is not just a row in some company's database, but rather something you cryptographically own and that cannot be taken away from you (unless you lose your private key, like with any crypto).
How Do You Join?
The easiest way to try urbit out is by using Port: https://urbit.org/getting-started/desktop
If you decide that you like it, you should get a planet: https://urbit.org/getting-started/get-planet
It's easiest to pay someone else to host your urbit. All the companies that offer hosting services are good actors from what I have seen, and for $10 to $20 per month they give you a planet and do all the hosting for you, so all you have to do is log in to your urbit from your computer and you are up and running.
If you are more technically inclined, you can run your own urbit on your own computer or on a cloud computer. To do that, you should at least be semi-comfortable using a terminal/command line.
How I Use Urbit
I run my urbit on a cloud server and can access it from anywhere.
I use the Uqbar EScape mobile app to see all my urbit groups and chat with people.
Thanks for listening!
Want to get prepared as a Catholic in these dark times?
Get my book for just the cost of printing and shipping!
