I'll try. First, what it is: Urbit is a virtual machine OS for server-side applications. If you imagine a future in which it is common for non-technical people to rent cloud server space on which to host server-side applications (say, a small blog, a mastodon node, a minecraft server, etc), Urbit aspires to be a good platform on which to host them.
Second, why it's so weird: it aspires to be "done" someday, as in no new features to add, no bugs left, just stable forever (sometimes called Kelvin versioning). It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or performance).
Third, you can't understand it without being aware that the founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a result.
Second, why it's so weird: it aspires to be "done" someday, as in no new features to add, no bugs left, just stable forever (sometimes called Kelvin versioning). It's design makes no sense unless you understand this; the bespoke languages it's written in are designed to be too simple to have any unexpected behaviors (as opposed to being designed for ease of use or performance).
Third, you can't understand it without being aware that the founder got #cancelled for his (unrelated to urbit) right-wing blogging, so most of the responses in this thread will be from people who really dislike that guy and dismiss urbit as a result.