Federating Moons

>galen

Monday • 23:06

23:06

we thought about this a bunch in like 2017

23:07

urbithub instead of github

I host sites for many users with an interest in the patterns that lead to effective working practice for legal entities, scarce objects and collaborations around commons production. Roughly 150 sites are hosted on this server. Neighboring servers host up to 800. These documents are easy to use and hard to abuse: we have yet to see trolls, squatters, domestic terrorists or even much porn. Many of these sites are abandoned units and remain claimed using only DNS record instead of using a wildcard: this leaves those pages open for anyone to navigate to the URL and start editing until each page is claimed using an email authentication.

On Urbit, Moons are child identities issued by planets, stars, and galaxies. An analogy may be drawn between wildcard DNS and Urbit's 64-bit address spaces: a .wiki name provides clear indication of context under rules managed by ICANN. Similarly, stars route packets (like an ISP) and galaxies act as DNS root servers. The names of the 256 galaxies in the urbit network are the same as the 256 suffixes. Star names are made from prefixes and suffixes. Planet names are made up of two six letter words.

A single page browser application that expands on typical web formats and protocols could enable wiki pages to be shuffled between Moons and found later through metadata that accumulates and travels with pages. Wiki manages pages saved as json text and often kept in flat files. It also keeps some additional state, metadata, related to identity such as login details and a favicon flag.

A moon keeps two subdirectories:

A planet keeps multiple 64-bit