Interesting thoughts. I'll just weigh in on the ones I feel confident answering:
> I have absolutely no idea why they've invented a custom p2p network/addressing system.
Part of what Urbit does is make it easy to identify people and exchange messages with them, so it has to have a built-in idea of what identity means and how to tell who someone is. If it didn't have its own identities, each application would have to do that itself, which is where we are today.
> I have absolutely no idea how this has anything to do with social media.
It's just a use case that everyone's familiar with which illustrates something that urbit makes easy to do. But I think the hope is that "Hosting continuously available cryptographically identified server apps is easy now, what shall we do with that?" would spawn genuinely new niches, in the same way that mobile phones have.
> Even if we assume that all of Urbit's ideas pan out: interacting with Twitter seems to completely undermine all of it!
I think the idea is that you'd have some app on urbit that sits between you and your social media. So, when you take a picture of your kid and want to share it, you'd use an app within urbit that would (say) post it to twitter, put it on facebook but only for "family", and store a copy in the "backed up monthly by the hosting provider" folder. As social media apps come and go, you could use them while they're useful and abandon them when you tire of them, without having to export or import things.
> I have absolutely no idea why they've invented a custom p2p network/addressing system.
Part of what Urbit does is make it easy to identify people and exchange messages with them, so it has to have a built-in idea of what identity means and how to tell who someone is. If it didn't have its own identities, each application would have to do that itself, which is where we are today.
> I have absolutely no idea how this has anything to do with social media.
It's just a use case that everyone's familiar with which illustrates something that urbit makes easy to do. But I think the hope is that "Hosting continuously available cryptographically identified server apps is easy now, what shall we do with that?" would spawn genuinely new niches, in the same way that mobile phones have.
> Even if we assume that all of Urbit's ideas pan out: interacting with Twitter seems to completely undermine all of it!
I think the idea is that you'd have some app on urbit that sits between you and your social media. So, when you take a picture of your kid and want to share it, you'd use an app within urbit that would (say) post it to twitter, put it on facebook but only for "family", and store a copy in the "backed up monthly by the hosting provider" folder. As social media apps come and go, you could use them while they're useful and abandon them when you tire of them, without having to export or import things.