I suspect the reason Urbit is "hard to explain" is not because the what we're doing is hard to understand but because most people disagree with *why* we're doing it.

What Urbit is: An attempt to make personal servers viable for consumers, so that the internet can go back to being between me and you, not between me and some company's server.

Why don't people run personal servers? Two reasons: first, there's not many peer-to-peer apps because those are hard to build without people having personal servers; second, managing a server is impossible for most people and unsavory for everyone.

Both of these reasons are due to explosions of complexity unavoidable in building something on the Unix/Internet stack.

By gradient descent, the world has converged on SaaS: shunt all complexity to a few companies who will pay people a lot of money to deal with the complexity, and you get a kiosk to access it.

Urbit says: no, we think it's possible to build software that doesn't lead to explosions of complexity. But nothing in Unix/Internet is salvageable, it must be a totally clean layer over it. So Urbit is an OS and networking stack that doesn't lead to explosions of complexity.

That's really it. The thing that makes this hard to understand is that people don't agree with one or more of:

- peer-to-peer apps are hard to build
- people don't want to manage a Unix server
- explosions of complexity are real and cause the above
- Unix can't be saved because so many aspects of it lead to explosions of complexity

And of course, when you're rebuilding everything, there's a thousand little decisions, each of which can easily be given the middlebrow dismissal if you don't agree with the above. But there's not point in discussing those if you're not willing to genuinely discuss the above.

Is Urbit actually massive in scope? Well, sort of. It's a massively different way of thinking about the problem, but it's (1) not very complex and (2) not very alien in the actual decisions it makes. They just happen to be decisions nobody makes who's a slave to gradient descent.