Some context here is that Curtis was recently fired from his role by the Urbit Foundation's Executive Director. The UF board then fired the ED and replaced him with Curtis. There's presently a vote to now reform the board here:
https://master-malwyl.cypher.host/apps/coupA demo of the competing vision for Urbit (Neoscape) can be found here:
https://x.com/master_malwyl/status/1940166761392816613Extra information from Curtis' side:
https://x.com/sorreg_namtyv/status/1942413771127033976And a thread on the anti-Curtis side:
https://x.com/hassundotX/status/1944868646272295021---
My opinion is that Moses looks pathetic compared to Neoscape. The feedback from the anti-Curtis side is that he is not interacting with current Urbiters and seems uninterested in actually being a part of their actually existing community, preferring his current political clique. The thought process behind Moses seems to be: "I sure am in a lot of Signal group chats with various cultural and political players. Wouldn't it be nice if they were chatting on Urbit instead? That'd be cool." He even says as much here:
> Moses is seeded from my social network, whereas Messenger is seeded from Galen’s. These are very different groups.The UX for Moses looks poor. Trees are a bad way of having long-form conversations. If I make root post A and there are replies B and C with some overlap and some differences I want to reply to, what should I do? Reply individually to B and C, splitting the common thread? Make a child post on A responding to them? If I do the former and someone else does the latter, now what? Trees are okay for ephemeral discussions where a conversation doesn't need to last more than a couple posts, for everything else you want linear + quotes. This critique is partially addressed here:
> A new topic is a root level post in this tree. But you can post on a thread at any time in the past. But the normal process of reading a single-page forum is, as in chat, to scroll downward through all unread messages. To this end, we have strong read tracking and collapsing. You see and scroll through all unread messages in the conversation, in tree order. Everything that has been read is collapsed.Which will mean the user will be constantly un-collapsing trees in order to figure out the context for a post, possibly even needing to speculatively un-collapse sibling trees. I don't think this was thought through much!
Also odd is this assertion:
> Moses uses the “computer-in-wallet” metaphor of Butyl.When:
> There is no LocalStorage state, at least as presently designed, and no backend state on http://urbit.box. The Moses app is a pure front endA disappointing vision all in all from one of the few computing projects that was making headway in boiling the ocean. This is just a web app with a Metamask frontend.