They have free IDs too, but groups can block them to reduce spam.
The free IDs have some other negatives too I think (long names, harder to recover, etc.).
The price is quite low ~$10 for a 'planet' or standard ID. Maybe in the developing world that price is too high, but I'd suspect if it succeeded to the point where that was an issue it could be solved without too much trouble.
The ID solution is cool because it fixes the spam issue which is one of the core incentives behind centralization.
The other core reason to centralize is server management and finding other users. If you design an OS that has this bit baked into it from the start you can make this complexity invisible to the user. You can have apps be p2p by default without the user having to know about it, you can make it easy for users to send photos or messages directly to each other rather than always having to interoperate with a middleman company (FB, Google etc.).
Their approach of starting as a VM that runs in linux is a good idea, it allows iteration on something that's immediately usable. Their initial focus on chat too I think is smart - it gets people using it while they improve it and immediately seeing changes.
Long term goal would be getting urbit running on its own hardware without the virtual layer, but I think if they started trying to do that they wouldn't succeed. With the current approach they might.
The free IDs have some other negatives too I think (long names, harder to recover, etc.).
The price is quite low ~$10 for a 'planet' or standard ID. Maybe in the developing world that price is too high, but I'd suspect if it succeeded to the point where that was an issue it could be solved without too much trouble.
The ID solution is cool because it fixes the spam issue which is one of the core incentives behind centralization.
The other core reason to centralize is server management and finding other users. If you design an OS that has this bit baked into it from the start you can make this complexity invisible to the user. You can have apps be p2p by default without the user having to know about it, you can make it easy for users to send photos or messages directly to each other rather than always having to interoperate with a middleman company (FB, Google etc.).
Their approach of starting as a VM that runs in linux is a good idea, it allows iteration on something that's immediately usable. Their initial focus on chat too I think is smart - it gets people using it while they improve it and immediately seeing changes.
Long term goal would be getting urbit running on its own hardware without the virtual layer, but I think if they started trying to do that they wouldn't succeed. With the current approach they might.