title: Assembly 2022 | Holium: The Next Frontier
author: Urbit
publication: YouTube
published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00
source_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-MtMu-Jbf4
word_count: 2255
hey everyone my name is Trent from holium and today I want to talk about the next Frontier there are two kinds of people that look into the frontier and see different things one thing they see is the unknown and you and and they enter it with fear and anxiety but there are other people that Venture forth and embrace the unknown they see Adventure they see opportunity they see new freedoms and for those that go first that leave the Old World Behind those are the forerunners I think people here today are the forerunners and that's what we're trying to facilitate when I started Holly I'm a few years ago I had a crazy idea it was to create a community scale internet something that was personal because the internet's become impersonal it's become and In this River of ads there's no ability to truly connect so how do we do this how do we build a world where community exist in the digital Realm and that was something I was thinking about a lot two or three years ago instead of a homogenistic monoculture how could we build a digital archipelago a vibrant digital cultures as you can imagine we came across there a bit as one does when they are thinking these thoughts and at first I I didn't know what to think about her but you know it was just messaging at the time there was no software distribution there was no developers building things on it but then I went to assembly last year and that assembly I saw something there was this moment and it's one of these moments that you only see you know every decade maybe more I saw the software distribution demo and somehow I could see this future world where we were liberated from the Facebook's we were liberated from the twitters we could build our own world online Urban reimagined the server they made it personal you owned your data you owned your home and I have to thank command for that they did a lot of work to get it there to where they could do that software distribution demo and when I saw that we pivoted our con our entire company we kind of threw away everything and started building on our bit which was crazy at the time because I think we were the first company that went through the combine program which was a program that Josh at the foundation um and Anthony put together and so we ditched it all and started building on our bed and we didn't we didn't know initially what we were doing we were learning Hoon as we were building we were trying to figure it all out and then we realized that Urban needed something more it had this beautiful back-end infrastructure this ability to compose data and own the data thank you but he was trapped in this Frame that existed in the old world it was trapped in the browser this is a web browser I think this is Mosaic from 1994. and you know surprisingly it kind of feels exactly like our modern browsers um the only difference I guess is that today our browsers look more like this right I mean I have so many tabs open I can't even see what the tab is and I was reading like statistics to try to under understand like what's the average number of tabs people have and it was like three and I was like who did the Google Chrome team like fund some research for this like what the hell like it's definitely more than three and so what do you do what do we do we're trapped in the browser we're trapped in this Forest of tabs we're lost I think we have to build a new world we have to leave the browser behind and figure out a new way to use urban something that breaks the community out of these fragmented windows you know you go you go into Discord you go into Facebook and Twitter the social graphs are very isolated and the user experience if if we do not free ourselves from the browser what people will engage with on airbed will have data composability on the back end but the front end will be just like the old world so we have to think about how we break free and there are three three ways that we break free and we're hoping to you know they'll build build these ways the first one is focusing on new ways to collaborate outside of a browser frame outside of a tab the next one is enabling Commerce but Commerce that is frictionless using metamask dealing with your bank it's very difficult it's not great that's why you know normies didn't adopt crypto in large numbers but I think we can fix that and the last one is community Community has to be broken out of a browser it has to live in its own frame and so those are the three things that we're trying to do enable collaboration frictionless Commerce and breaking the community free from the frame first thing I'll talk about is uh collaboration and this is really exciting so you go back to the 90s you know the browser ux that's still largely the same was for one user on one web page you're viewing a document a hypertext document um and it was kind of a solo experience so if we want to build this community internet if polyam wants to achieve this we've got to find a way to make it not just one person so we're gonna make presence A Primitive and unlock this capability for urban Developers so what you're seeing here is um our rooms primitive uh and what you can do with this is set up arbitrary rooms talk with people like Discord like Twitter spaces it's all done through webrtc so it's peer-to-peer and what we hope to enable with this is not just voice and not video but also data channels so arbitrary data that could be streamed from any developer who's who's leveraging our Tech and one thing you can do with that is collaborative cursing cursors so we can enable figma for everything because figma really figured out the key to the next step with the internet which was collaborative editing collaborative software and so with this primitive on orbit [Music] baked into the rooms agent that we've developed I think they're going to be really cool experiences that get built one of the things we're going to enable and you can imagine like what are some what are some apps that you use that have this collaborative feature set probably like Google Docs or something so we have this app that we're working on um Avalon Labs partnering with us they're trying to build on top of our rooms primitive and our presence primitive to build Google docs for orbit and part of that is collaboration so as we get further down the roadmap for the collaboration feature set you're going to start seeing Google Docs like experiences appear multiple people editing things all of it being resolved and stored in orbit okay so there's one collaboration it's going to be really cool I I really I can't even imagine what's going to happen when we get this in developers hands and and commerce is the second one so you know you know that crypto's just got bad ux I mean this is how I usually send people crypto transactions you know you you know you open a messenger you send them you send them the address and you copy and paste and then you like look at it and you squint and you're like whoa did I did I accidentally like put in the wrong letter like did I paste in the last one and it's just like it's not a great experience and we still do this so what could happen if the wallet was a primitive and you could send crypto transactions via your Urban ID and one of the things that the the wallet agent provides [Applause] so one of the things that the wallet agent provides is the ability to permission your wallet permission your addresses so maybe for one dial you want to be paid by this address for this group you want to share that one for your friends for like beers and and all of that there's that address and this is going to be very powerful because not only is it a wallet permit of just for sending transactions but one thing that we can do okay yeah one thing that we can do when you break free from the browser is then the browser is just an app it's just an app that's sitting alongside the orbit apps and that experience of using metamask can go away and you can use the realm wallet so you can Bridge the old world into this new world that we're building that's peer-to-peer because we're not gonna have everything on day one but eventually we will and the third one's community so this one's a really important point because that's really what started this journey for halium we we wanted to enable digital culture we wanted to enable you know digital artifacts to be generated and one of the things that you can't do you know with web 2 and the social media era uh companies is that everything is transient it's never flowing river serving you more ads the memory is 30 seconds maybe maybe more I don't know depends on what you say um but if you break Community free of the browser and free from the Stranglehold of this construct this webview construct I think we're going to see some amazing things so this is an interesting point we have three billion users on Facebook they use the exact same interface three billion people there's like there's no culture in that sorry um I don't know who's the designer there but let's move on um communities need a home they need something that they can personalize together and so one of the things that we're going to provide is that home and what you see at the top is you see this thing we call the App Suite so you see you know Talon is making their Suite of apps um Akbar will be providing Suites of apps you could think about this as like a decentralized g Suite that you can configure as a community right so if you're a dow and you have your own tools those would be in the App Suite or you could use hollium products and so with this home base you you can do a lot it's one common context for the entire community and you can set your vibe so we we made some example ones from every communities just to kind of give you a sense of it so here the Dark theme this one obviously is that beautiful image at the beginning a left out that's that seems right the network state and I feel like this is Akbar that's the vibe so those are the three things that we're focusing on that we want to enable for everyone on airbit exclusively on Urban really and what we call this is Realm so realm is really exciting and I will play this demo um that sort of highlights everything you saw all those puzzle pieces in one experience so you know password protection we encrypt the state locally oh there's that too um yeah so notifications in the tray so the way maybe I can tell you so over here is like your personal context so you've got notifications you've got your messages and your wallet yeah and I want to change my uh wallpaper there so now it's updated to this brand new theme um your DMs are in here so all the DMS that you have and Landscape you can use in here and we have some cool features planned for for the for the messaging app obviously we have the wallet which you know we're gonna make Fort Knox we're gonna make it very very secure and in this personal context this your personal desktop you have your app grid you know it's familiar you've got your friend list you can install apps but as you move to other spaces you you have this group Hub or Community hub and over time we'll expand it of course we'll add all these new features hopefully we'll unlock uh developers to add new features but this is sort of our vision of what's going to be coming and this you'll see very soon the alpha will be late 2022 so later on this year we will have a private Alpha so there is an email list on our website and we are going to be selecting people from that list to test the beta and help us solve the problems and scale up and publicly we're going to do it in mid 2023. so this is sort of what we're doing you know it's been a long year the team has been working endless nights and yeah this is Realm or this is around foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music]