Leo

W E L C O M E T O L O D G E I’m delighted to announce Urban Tiger’s first product, Lodge, now generally available. To host a lodge, just go to urbit.house. To be a guest, wait till someone invites you! Lodge is “half Eyes Wide Shut, half Chatham House Rules.” It’s a private chat/forum with strong anonymity. Everyone gets a random name from the blockchain. No one, not even you, has any record of who is who. Your forum runs on your private, encrypted cloud server (*). Lodge is for all human beings who cannot speak their true minds if there is any risk that they might be “held accountable.” We do everything possible to prevent doxing. You can even cover your financial tracks with ZCash. (But you don’t need to know anything about crypto.) Who needs a lodge? Your office needs a lodge. Your campus or department. Your agency. Start a lodge, and find a way to get the invite link or QR code to your founding members. Secret societies are a human universal. It doesn’t get more secret than Lodge. To use Lodge, you and your guests install the House web app (app stores don’t like meta-apps). You’ll save your secret with a passkey and back it up with a 6-word poem. Your name is also a wallet, which holds its own token. (But you don’t need to know anything about crypto.) Lodge is the first app on Urban Tiger’s new version of Urbit. Unlike the old Urbit experience (Tlon Messenger), urbit.house is both fully noncustodial, and fully general-purpose. Also, your guests don’t need their own servers. (But if they want to start their own lodges, it only takes a few clicks.) The Lodge UX is “half forum, half chat.” Like a forum, it has a timeline tree. Like a chat, it flows through your unreads. The design was inspired by the original social network, Usenet. On a desktop you even “doomspace,” like it was 1986. You’ll be billed for your server in crypto—by usage, not time (since it’s a functional server). It’s cheap. And you can charge dues. Check it out: urbit.house (*—the servers aren’t encrypted quite yet. Give us a couple more weeks to spin up the TEEs. Then we’ll destroy the old cleartext.)