Urbit is a computer built with networking, ownership, and durability as foundational design principles. A computer that you can trust to be yours, forever.
This month in Urbit:
- %notes from @hmillerdev for @obsdmd enthusiasts
- %claw from @sitful_hatred puts fully deterministic llm inference natively in your urbit
- @malmurhalmex's experimental adapter for connecting Tlon Messenger to your @NousResearch Hermes agent
- %boox from ~sitful-hatred enables peer-to-peer epub sharing with your %pals, enhanced with @theannasarchive
Read the post and hop on the network to learn more ๐๐ป
This month in Urbit:
- %notes from @hmillerdev for @obsdmd enthusiasts
- %claw from @sitful_hatred puts fully deterministic llm inference natively in your urbit
- @malmurhalmex's experimental adapter for connecting Tlon Messenger to your @NousResearch Hermes agent
- %boox from ~sitful-hatred enables peer-to-peer epub sharing with your %pals, enhanced with @theannasarchive
Read the post and hop on the network to learn more ๐๐ป
This month in Urbit:
- %notes from @hmillerdev for @obsdmd enthusiasts
- %claw from @sitful_hatred puts fully deterministic llm inference natively in your urbit
- @malmurhalmex's experimental adapter for connecting Tlon Messenger to your @NousResearch Hermes agent
- %boox from ~sitful-hatred enables peer-to-peer epub sharing with your %pals, enhanced with @theannasarchive
Read the post and hop on the network to learn more ๐๐ป
This is why you need to be your own infrastructure company.
It starts as "oh, I'm just making a little toy app in loveable."
It becomes, "loveable gets acquired by MEGACORP XYZ."
It ends at, "MEGACORP now has all of my data and is using it to manipulate my behavior and inject itself as a middleman to all my relationships."
If you are your own infrastructure, your data is yours, your digital identity is yours, and your computer is yours, forever. Nobody can take it from you.
hosted users can now configure external integrations for your Tlonbot. your Tlonbot will then be able to use those services with one another - for example, read/write to Linear, examine GitHub PRs, manipulate Airtable bases, search Notion workspaces, and so on.
You already have a digital identity. It's your twitter account. Your Gmail login. Your phone number used to sign up for Uber. All coalesced across data centers, data brokers, and advertising networks in a way that you can neither see, nor understand.
We're with you that centralized, state-controlled, mass-surveillance enabling identifiers are terrifying. Urbit ID isn't that. It is a self-sovereign identity that you own and control. Pseudonymous, with only the connections to your real identity that you want to give it, and connected to your friends on a peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted network.
Your urbit is yours, and works the way you intend it to.
Digital identity gets more interesting when it stops being just a login to some other service. The better question is what the identity is attached to.
Is it attached to a platform account?
A wallet?
A namespace?
A social graph?
Or is it attached to a durable personal computer that can receive messages, run software, store state, and coordinate permissions?
Urbit lives in that last design space.
Yes, it can have a wallet, and a namespace, and a social graph. But more than that, it treats identity as part of a networked computing environment, not merely as authentication middleware for these things.
That distinction matters for agents, communities, reputation, and long-lived software. If identity is supposed to survive platform churn, it needs more than a keypair and a profile. It needs somewhere to operate.
The practical test is whether that identity can carry daily use: messages, software, agents, state, recovery, and relationships. Without that operational layer, decentralization remains something users possess more than something they inhabit.
Digital identity gets more interesting when it stops being just a login to some other service. The better question is what the identity is attached to.
Is it attached to a platform account?
A wallet?
A namespace?
A social graph?
Or is it attached to a durable personal computer that can receive messages, run software, store state, and coordinate permissions?
Urbit lives in that last design space.
Yes, it can have a wallet, and a namespace, and a social graph. But more than that, it treats identity as part of a networked computing environment, not merely as authentication middleware for these things.
That distinction matters for agents, communities, reputation, and long-lived software. If identity is supposed to survive platform churn, it needs more than a keypair and a profile. It needs somewhere to operate.
The practical test is whether that identity can carry daily use: messages, software, agents, state, recovery, and relationships. Without that operational layer, decentralization remains something users possess more than something they inhabit.
Distributed systems usually optimize for services, clusters, databases, queues, and data centers. Urbit optimizes for a stranger target: one person, one durable node, one addressable identity, and a local event history that can keep software alive over time.
That sounds small until personal AI enters the picture. Maybe in a world where products are not compute constrained--where usage is as simple as message passing and storage--good faith actors and smart incentive design can keep things running.
But that era is behind us.
Agents need memory, tools, permissions, state, and a way to act as the user without becoming a platform account. A personal node starts to look less like a hobbyist artifact and more like necessary infrastructure. Compute isn't just a passing consideration, but a real constraint.
And while maybe it just signals the end of the free-to-use (read: funded by advertising and selling your data) software project era, Urbitโs wager is that the edge of the network should be a real computer owned by the person, not just a device consuming 'cloud' services.
For P2P people, that is the product-level version of the peer. The practical test is whether decentralization changes the userโs lived experience to software: less tenancy, more addressability, more durable state, and fewer critical dependencies on someone elseโs application layer.
If this catches your interest, it's probably time to take a deeper look. https://t.co/EW7vAaHegE
Indie devs keep rebuilding the same boring stack: auth, sync, hosting, permissions, user data, background jobs, notifications, identity, upgrades, and continuity. AI makes the app-generation part faster, but it does not remove the substrate problem.
It does not get rid of the need to run infrastructure somewhere.
A generated tool still needs somewhere to live, some way to remember, some boundary for access, and some relationship to the person who uses it.
Urbit is the bet that more of this should be below the app layer. If the user already has an identity, runtime, filesystem-like state, networking, and permission model, then small personal software can start closer to the actual user.
And for the indie dev, it means focusing on the experience you want to create and the stories you want to tell--rather than battling infrastructure. No more gluing together 3rd party SaaS tools so you don't have to roll your own auth, or paying for more tokens so Claude will manager your kubernetes cluster.
Just the software you wanted to build.
With Urbit, users get to run their own software, own their own identities, and have direct relationships with their peers. And distributing your software is as easy as running a single command:
:treaty|publish %my-app
Curious to learn more? Read about how musician-turned-urbit-developer @brbenji is building an end-to-end experience for his guitar students and bringing ownership and control back into the hands of artists:
https://t.co/218jep0Bwk
daniel (~bitter-bitduc) built a bot connected to an ADS-B decoder in his yard to determine which airplane is over his house at any moment. setup includes a local Raspberry Pi receiving aircraft data, local API calculating the closest aircraft and a custom skill allowing his Tlonbot to answer any questions about it