Announcing Tlon Hosting!

[Nick Simmons]

Hello!

We built an Urbit hosting service, and all of you–and your friends–are precisely the kind of people we’d like to be able to try it out.

Last March we started moving our-day-to day lives to Urbit. Both Tlon and the Urbit Community (all of you!) have been chatting, writing, and sharing links on Urbit for the past six months. It’s produced some great conversations and nascent communities; but we don’t need to tell you that. 

Now that we’re actually living on Urbit, the next step is to make it simpler and easier for our friends to join us and participate in the communities we’ve built. Up until now, if you wanted to run an Urbit node, you’d have to do it yourself. We built an automated system for this, so we can start an Urbit node for someone on demand. We can go from 0 → running Urbit in a few minutes in a web browser. It’s nice. 

Getting this hosting system to the point that we’re happy with it is going to take some time. We’re going to onboard people into it by hand so we can find bugs and learn how to refine the process. As to not overwhelm ourselves or our infrastructure, we set up a waiting list so we can bring people onto the system at the rate we can accommodate.

We’re planning to announce this service to the wider world at an event on October 9th. We’ll run a live demo and Galen (~ravmel-ropdyl) will talk a bit about what this means for Tlon and Urbit going forward.

Before this happens, we want to make sure that existing members of the community can reserve spots in line ahead of everyone else. Here’s how that works:

- Go to https://tlon.io

- Fill out the waitlist form

- Make sure to reply ‘Calmly’ to the ‘How is your day going?’ question—this is your referral code

This code will (a) let us know to onboard you as soon as we can and (b) give you access to community member pricing of $21/month. Feel free to share this code with close friends privately. We’ll retire the code on October 9th when we announce the service to the public.

(One quick disclaimer: hosting isn’t for everyone. There are certain tradeoffs to hosting that can’t be avoided. To run your Urbit node, we have to hold your management key. If you or your friends are extremely security or privacy-oriented, you’ll probably want to run your own node. That said, our hosting is designed to be very easy to exit: you’ll always be able to download your data and host yourself.)

Finally, we’ve been exceedingly impressed with the kinds of people who find their way to Urbit and we want to make it easier for current users to bring others onto the network. We want more people like you!

Urbit is fundamentally about communities. Unlike top-down megacorp platforms, Urbit doesn’t succeed by inflating itself with alienated, individual users, but by giving healthy communities the tools to grow and maintain themselves. The people we want you to invite to this service are the ones you’d value as members of the communities you maintain. 

Talk soon,

Nick 

-- 

~simfur-ritwed

https://urbit.org