Welcome to This Month in Urbit, our series for sharing recent happenings from around the Urbit network. To fully participate, you will need to know how to run an Urbit ship. If you don't know how to do that yet, point your favorite AI agent at this page and it will help get you started. Or check out the getting started documentation to do it the old-school way.

This guide is written to be human-friendly, allowing you to follow along and learn something new. Embedded in this page are also instructions for your agent; share the link and your agent should help you through getting the enclosed items up and running. The AI landscape is fast-moving and variable, so we can't guarantee everything will work smoothly, but we try to test across various models and agent harnesses. If you or your agents ever get stuck, just give a shout in The Urbit Foundation group on Tlon Messenger and we'll help you out.

August Quickstart

This month, there is a variety of Gall applications to play with. As always, you can get the latest runtime by running:

curl -fsSL https://urbit.org/get-runtime.sh | sh

If you want to boot a fresh ship with the August TMIU pill, we recommend using a moon. To get a moon networking key, just run |moon in your planet's dojo. You can do this from the webterm on a Tlon-hosted planet. Then boot your moon with the August TMIU pill:

urbit -w <moon-name> -G <moon-key> -u https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/urbit.orgcontent/tmiu-pills/tmiu-august.pill --http-port 8899

(If you don't have moon keys, replace the moon arguments with -c tmiu-august-comet to get started with a comet.)

As usual, the pill also includes %mcp from The Groundwire Foundation, %obelisk from ~nomryg-nilref, %pals from ~palfun-foslup, and %hawk from ~migrev-dolseg.

Earth protocols find their way to Mars

Urbit may be a Martian computing stack, but that doesn't mean we never want to communicate with Earth. This month, ~sitful-hatred continues his campaign to enable more classic computing use cases on Urbit—this time tackling code storage and sharing, federated social media, and secure decentralized communications. If your friends aren't yet on Urbit but they like Git, the AT Protocol, or Matrix, you can still connect and collaborate.

Git on Urbit

Urbit's Clay filesystem has its own Urbit-native revision control system. But bootstrapping the entire developer landscape on a novel form of revision control isn't the only possible way to store and distribute code from your urbit. Sometimes something familiar is useful—particularly in an era when people are increasingly frustrated with, and suspicious of, GitHub as the sole home for their Git repositories. When you just want a safe place to stash your code and share it with friends, install %urgit, available from ~matwet:

|install ~matwet %urgit

Once you have it installed, try adding ~matwet as a peer. You will be able to browse the code repositories for the protocols he has shipped this month.

Decentralized social protocols

Running your own personal server—and having all your friends do the same—is something like the platonic ideal of decentralized networked computing. In such a world, social protocols are decentralized by default. In some sense, this is the point of Urbit.

But as with software developers and their penchant for Git, maybe your friends aren't quite ready for that. More broadly than friends, maybe there are legacy-internet personalities you want to follow. %atpro lets you do this from inside your urbit. Install it on your ship:

|install ~matwet %atpro

You can then sign in to your Bluesky account—or another AT Protocol-compatible service—via OAuth and interact with your favorite posters and followers directly from your urbit.

A chat app, but this time it's different, we promise

We know Urbit has a reputation as being "a chat app." But ~sitful-hatred is helping us beat the allegations by showing that Urbit is a platform for implementing self-hosted, peer-to-peer protocols. In this case, yes, by implementing another chat app that runs on your urbit. But %matpro helps make the point that your urbit is a Turing-complete machine on top of which Earth-side decentralized messaging protocols can be implemented. If you have friends using Matrix, install %matpro and use it to connect with them:

|install ~matwet %matpro

One particularly neat feature is the ability to set up an Ames federation relay and send signed Matrix transactions directly between Urbit ships. That's Ames as an overlay network at work, helping us slowly eat all of networked computing—one byte at a time.

Chat app advocacy

Not everyone is against the idea of a Cambrian explosion of chat apps. ~disden-talhes, one of Urbit's greatest out-of-band thinkers, is a strong advocate for ever more chat apps on Urbit. That said, he aims to expand the definition of "chat app" as far as possible. %noltbook may be the maximally excessive definition:

|install ~nolset %noltbook

Yes, you can send and receive messages. You can also make voice and video calls, send and receive other apps, and send $NOCK payments via Nockchain. There is plenty more to discover, but we don't want to spoil the fun. Get it running and explore.

(We'll give you a hint: to get started, search for ~disden-talhes in the sidebar and join his shared note.)

Experimental models of userspace

The "Neo Urbit" project has encountered delays and other upsets over the years, but in large part it is still underway. vere64 is under review and being prepared for release. Directed Messaging is now live on the network. And ~dozreg-toplud continues to chip away at an implementation of Subject Knowledge Analysis (SKA).

But the largest gap remains: userspace. Yes, there is ongoing userspace security work. But the "Shrubbery" infohazard also remains. Whether you call it "Gall shrubbery" or "Groundwire shrubbery," %grubbery is one such bite at the apple:

|install ~lasped-monrys-niblyx-malnus %grubbery

At this stage, it is very much an experimental tool for tinkering. But if you point your agents at it, you may be able to connect to its embedded %mcp, use its Git repository storage, and even write your own Grub apps. It also includes an example calendar app—with time zones. You can find and explore the repository on GitHub.

Bringing it all together

~nordus-mocwyl has taken recent releases—including %hawk, %obelisk, and %grubbery—and used them to overhaul his Beyond Beginner Guitar course, available at guitar.box for the intrepid musician. Check out his recent YouTube video, where he covers:

• The UX improvements made possible by %hawk at Kelvin 499
• Using Tlon group membership and roles to control courseware access
• Implementing Stripe payments so people can sign up without needing crypto or even a permanent Urbit ID
• Using %grubbery as an alternative framework for producing the same functionality

Have you been wanting to start playing with your urbit but aren't sure you're up for it? Consider this your sign to start experimenting for yourself.