If you're ahead of the curve enough, you will hear of urbit in a few years time, provided the community doesn't blow itself up in the meantime.

So what is urbit? Describing that feels like explaining World Wide Web in 1996. The shortest way I can think of is it's a decentralized personal computer. It's not Ethereum, but the backend does make use of Ethereum.

Even then that's a hardly a useful layman explainer, so let's try abstracting it one step further: once you acquire an urbit ship, it's a computer that can never be destroyed (terms & conditions applied).

What can you do with this computer? It comes with its unique identity so there's a social component. You get to install apps just like you do on a phone. For now you operate all these from their desktop application.

So what can we use this for? Ironically that's rather premature to say. At the moment the ecosystem isn't making groundbreaking software that can't be found in the regular web2 world.

The point is these are all built on the layer of an operating system that is always on. And there is no server to be taken down (again, terms & conditions applied).

Urbit crossed my radar few years back. The friction of getting into was high, and it's still high now. The first step is getting onto it at all, which involves acquiring an identity. Doing so isn't a matter of email & password. And what kind of identity itself requires grappling with the multiple concepts urbit invented.

A month back I managed to find someone on Twitter who gave me a planet (it's finite). From there I managed to set it up and got running. With that I got my unique identity. On top of that they got this fun thing that generates a unique sigil out of the identity, which I turned into a profile picture.

I'm sure this setup process got much easier by now but it's still far from consumer friendly. For the layman, the biggest turn off would be having to wrestle the layers of concepts. So I got what they call a planet. There's also stars, moons, comets. There are different networks by the name of Azimuth and whatevernot, and I still don't know why they matter.

Having went into forums from within urbit, the most appealing aspect I found was that people are delighfully weird. That's exactly how 1996 web felt like.

There seems to be data that suggest that urbit is onboarding more and more people, growth is strong. I haven't verified that yet but I shall take it on faith for now.

Given that, the question for me is what's next. Invest in real estate? Develop software on it? Build audience in it? Or do nothing?

The element in urbit I'm most skeptical about is scarcity. I'm not sure if limited real estate is a choice or engineering necessity. With scarcity comes financialization, with financialization comes all the downsides of capitalism.

When I think about what makes urbit mildly appealing to me, there's a theme I detect that's present across many other things I touch (including crypto). It's not decentralization, it's permanence (at least the promise of it). When nothing in life is permanent, something that claims offers that sounds mighty awesome. Whether that's a healthy thing to chase, that remains to be seen.