Urbit looks cool, but it will not magically make things distributed. What causes centralization are business factors. It&#x27;s just a lot easier to build a great product if you have a revenue source, which is most easily acquired if you can lock people into paying for your proprietary thing.<p>Also, it&#x27;s a lot easier to make good protocol decisions if you don&#x27;t have to get them published into a standard and deal with the beauracracy etc. If you look at the level of polish in slack vs one of the many previous open source irc clients, the difference is clear. It helps to have money.