Cool, so now that we scared away the "wordcels" and a bunch of technical people got excited by this clickbait title, I'll first tear into developers before I start tearing into marketers. Really, this is all your fault. Albeit in the 'extreme ownership' sort of way, but your fault none the less.
You "shape rotators" have no idea how to connect your technical capacities to what actual humans care about and so that opens up a necessary operational function: communicating the value of a piece of software to an audience that could give less than a fuck about how it works yet cares deeply about what capabilities it affords them. In the ideal case, this gap is filled by technically inclined "word rotators," but as those are even fewer and further between than capable developers what you get instead are "Marketers".
Now, even these marketers are tremendously useful in many regards: they can simplify a technical reality into a basic concept that can be grasped by a broad audience. They understand the desires of their target audience. They understand how to get in front of that audience. But, like developers getting nerdsniped by interesting technical problems that don't matter to an end product, marketers can get way too wrapped up in having a "compelling narrative" and wandering down a rabbithole of semantic creep and messaging fluff. Where does this end up if it is not put in check? Some sort of deception or other mess that is 1 part Fyre festival, 1 part Enron scandal, and 1 part "Why the fuck do I have U2 albums on my iPhone?"
Let's take a look at this in the Urbit context.
Without being mindful about the narratives around Urbit as a sovereign computing stack, enthusiast storytelling inevitably gets either terrifyingly technical for your average human or becomes grossly disconnected from the base reality of the system. Both ends of this spectrum draw on things like the technical reality of the portability of one's pier, and the existence of hosting providers running customer piers, but fail to provide the necessary connective tissue to make a effective statements about the world. This means that 'you own your computer' is either a fundamental truth, or a tremendously fraught statement depending on the audience. For example, while it could be true that someone has their own pier and runs it on a machine they control, it is equally likely that they are being hosted by a service provider to get past the difficulty of running one's own urbit and all the maintainence and performance challenges of self-hosting.
Even here we begin to butt up against the need to start discussing technicalities. But I'll refrain, as the point of this article is not to dive deeply into the different ways you can host an Urbit ship. Rather, I want to go beyond the technical discussion and recognize that the functional optionality of "a computer that is completely yours" means that most people won't bother to learn all the options, even if described in an approachable manner.
Certainly it helps to begin couching these things in an approachable manner, nonetheless. We could begin this exercise, perhaps asking, "What are the sovereignty mediums that Urbit affords?" Which could then be described as something along the lines of:
But even then, I'm sure some portion of you are yelling at me through your computer monitor, starting to bring up more detailed questions like "Who holds your keys? Who manages your compute? Who has access to your data?" And these are all fair questions, but now start answering them for yourself. Go ahead, give yourself 30 seconds.
Ok, stop. How many branching conditionals did you get? Even without getting deep into the technical, you immediately encounter the optionality that is inherent in the system. This is precisely my point. Have you accidentally had this branching conditional conversation with your mom, or your barber? How quickly did their eyes glaze over? Faster than the money comes out of the printer at the Federal Reserve. In some sense, having this conversation at all means that you have already lost.
That doesn't mean that these people don't want the things that Urbit may afford them: better privacy, new application functionality, strong community, a place away from the advertising barrage of their least favorite megacorp. And thus we have the other side of the coin, the "Urbit is everything to everyone in every possible context" story. This might get them interested, but then when they first encounter the current state of the project, they will feel decieved. Perhaps they will find something else that makes them stick, but more likely than not, they will wander back to TikTok wondering if there is anything out there that can actually scratch that itch.
Hosting providers are the biggest of this fracture between messaging and reality. Why? Because they are trying to sell a novel system that focuses on breaking from our dependence on centralized services, being private for users, and being "yours"--while being centralized, locally-transparent, and at least semi-custodial themselves. This is a tough needle to thread and it isn't easy to communicate. Sometimes it makes you not want to even try. For example:
— Tlon Corporation (@tloncorporation) January 27, 2023
Tlon tries to take a safe or 'cozy' path on their twitter public messaging, but it basically ends up giving their audience exactly zero actionable information. It won't break anything, but it also won't move the needle.
On the flip side, Holium pushes hard on the aspirations of Urbit in stark contrast to what is currently available in the Web 2 arena:
When you talk and create with your friends on Realm, we don't have access to your content.
— Holium (@HoliumCorp) March 23, 2023
That's because you're not using our servers.
You *are* the server. pic.twitter.com/cseLV7yyUw
The trouble is, Holium is making a statement that is patently false for anyone using Third Earth hosting, which is the default onboarding experience for new Realm users. Now, for some interpretation of this and for some users, it can be a true statement. But for the users that are core to their business model, it just isn't true. And when those users figure that out, their trust in the Urbit system overall will be destroyed. Solving for this requires having larger categories that hinge on--and hold true to--key technical elements of the system.
This isn't to disparage Holium or Tlon, but rather to recognize that marketing a complex technology solution to a variety of audiences that value different elements of the system is hard. If refuse to take on the challenge you get nowhere, and if you fuck it up things can go real sideways real quick. Both Tlon and Holium's approaches appear to be variations on traditional B2C marketing stategies of feature hype and emotional bonding narratives, and then seem to result in making the biggest claims to every user about what could be true if they tried hard enough. This will not serve us well for the next stages of Urbit's network growth.
Urbit marketing, including around hosting, ought to be approached as the complex, multi-stakeholder 'solutions marketing' problem that it is. Doing this properly--I would suggest learning from B2B SaaS technology marketing strategies and tactics--will enable people understand their own sovereignty and self-select into something akin to 'tiers' or 'user personas'. By guiding people into these contexts, the technical reality of the downstream claims that get made about privacy, ownership, and responsibility will become more intuitive to users while reducing the risk of massive breaches of trust.
I would propose the following categories as the broad shapes for new audiences to understand what "a computer that is yours" means for them.
Full-Ownership: You own your identity. You own your compute. You may share some of your data or place trust in others, but it is up to you who else has access; not up to someone else if you have full access. Full-ownership is not something that you accidentally stumble in to, it is something you seek out. It might be some version of a platonic ideal, never actually even acheived but something to which the zealots inch ever closer. At it's core, it is the holding of your own Urbit ID in a crypto wallet that you control, and having control over the base operating system on which your Urbit ship is running. This may be a computer in your home, it may be a VPS in a datacenter, and there are many deeper nuances in this category, but it means ultimately you are your own first responder.
Right-to-Exit: You own your identity. You depend on others in some regard. Perhaps for compute, perhaps for data recovery, perhaps for troubleshooting and maintenance. But you can always pull your approval from the system; leave, exit, opt out. Exit may or may not be easy or lossless, but it is possible. It is implied that you are serviced by a hosting provider, although there are other possibilities here that may have yet to be explored (i.e. sending your pier to a friend to run for you while you travel the world and don't have a home base). You are putting trust into that provider in some form or fashion and counting on them to hold your best interests in the highest regard. You can revoke that trust, but you are counting on them to not break it as well.
Full-Custodianship: You need not take on new duties, but you get new experiences, and you get new relationships. You don't need to worry about safe storage of crypto keys and you can just login with the types of systems you find familiar and soothing, but you will ultimately still remain subject to the superstructures on which you rely. This isn't bad, it is merely an option that some will value. They don't want the duty of full sovereignty, but they do want to be a part of a network with their friends where they can have new experiences not possible in the world of web2.
Looking at this list, there is likely an option that calls to you more strongly than the others. This is fine, but not the point either. These options aren't good or bad, but rather they respect that humans are not served by web2s current "one-size-fits-all" model of "we own your data, your identity, your compute, and your code." Instead, we are taking the increased optionality that Urbit provides and shaping it into something that is more rapidly understood, that "does the trick" for rapid and intuitive understanding of ones standing in a tremendously broad possibility space.
We can elaborate on top of these, expanding on the fact the this is an open source project, that these boundaries aren't strict or set in stone, but it is essential that the narrative doesn't just wrap around the "Full Ownership" option if what is often being provided is something more akin to "Full Custodianship". And once you land the above categories with a novel audience, then you can help people understand how to shift between different categories, the tradeoffs, and the service providers that they may be most interested in working with.
And service providers themselves can properly filter the "urbit-curious" to the solutions that work best for them and not have to waste time on rectifying pseudo-technical misunderstandings or rebuilding carelessly violated notions of trustworthiness.Wait for our dedicated hardware, use an old laptop, or build your own hosting device with Colony OS. We don’t really care how you do it, we just want you on the network and we want you to own your data.
— NativePlanet (@NativePlanetIO) December 28, 2022