It’s been nearly two years since I’ve last published anything here - and a lot has happened. The first quick bit to note is that I left Tlon to go back to Palantir in early 2024 - this was a difficult decision. I still love what Tlon is doing, I really want the project to succeed, and a lot of my friends still work there.
Ultimately I felt I had to sign back up to help in defense. For those curious about this, Alex Karp’s recent book The Technological Republic is really great and worth a read. He also did a longer form interview on Bari Weiss’ podcast. This is just to say that posts from here on out are my views as a fan, but not working inside Tlon day to day.
A lot has happened since my last post in 2023, but if you haven’t been following along the biggest change is the new app (iOS and Android).
The app is great and has what you’d expect - notifications! fast performance! It also has built in contacts that make it easy to keep track of other users you know on the network via their Urbit ID (and you can set a custom name for them). When accessed on a desktop, the UI served now closely resembles the app too (rendered for desktop) so it’s a similar experience across all devices. The app supports connecting to an Urbit planet you host yourself (I access mine that I host on my Native Planet) or to an ID hosted by Tlon. There’s currently a waitlist if you want to use Tlon Hosting and don’t already have an account, but if you’d like to skip it dm me on X and I can get you in.
Tlon also now supports importing an existing ID and pier (this has been true for a while) - so if you have a local planet you’ve been wanting to get hosted you can email support@tlon.io and they’ll help get you into their hosting.
The other big changes since my last update: the separate %talk app is dead (a separate app for dms never made much sense anyway) and while %landscape and a handful of other Urbit apps still exist, they’re largely irrelevant these days. That may change in the future, but as I see it Tlon is focused on delivering a really good user experience for this core use case - freeing chat from centralized servers and middle men outside of your control. I’d recommend most users don’t install any other apps and just use Tlon Messenger.
Aside from the app a lot of other things changed at the UF with Curtis Yarvin rejoining the project and the UF team scaling way down - I have less insight into what’s happening there with Urbit core development, but if you’re curious you can ask around in the UF group on the network. I’m generally pro-founder so I’m optimistic.
That’s essentially it for now - with the Tlon Messenger app and my urbit hosted on my home network on a native planet things generally “just work” - there really isn’t anymore maintenance, native planet keeps my urbit up to date. I run a few planets on the native planet hardware (mine and my wife’s) without issue. I have a custom domain set up for them (and the s3 minio that’s also on my native planet to host images for the urbit), but that’s made painless by Native Planet’s software, docs, and their on network support. You can also skip all that and just use Tlon Hosting at first too. If you ever decide you want to leave Tlon Hosting to host on your own hardware it’s easy to do it via your account settings page.
Check it out, create your own group, invite friends, and carve out a little bit of the new internet for yourself.
See you on the network.