One of the things that gives us (Matrix) enormous hope for the future is the shift we've seen in the Decentralised Web community over the last few years, where projects who in the past might have competed now support each other.

In the end, there is an incredibly small handful of developers working on decentralised infrastructure, who generally share very similar ideology and goals, pitted against an entire industry which defaults to holding users hostage in silos. We gotta stick together to prevail :)

So, Urbit: huge thanks for the support - we really appreciate it. And good luck on your side too!

I agree - I see this Benjamin Franklin ("if we don't all stand together, we shall all hang separately") attitude everywhere.

But I don't think this new attitude is an accident. It's not just because we're good people, or even good engineers. It's an inevitable consequence of what we're trying to do.

Fundamentally, all decentralized systems are one big federation. If two decentralized systems can't talk to each other, that's because no one needs to connect them yet. There is never a question of whether the connection can be made, as with centralized systems.

In short: for decentralized systems, the n in Metcalfe's law ("the value of a network is proportional to n^2, where n is its user count" - I think it's more like n log n, but whatever) is the number of users not in any decentralized network, but in all decentralized networks. (It also should add any centralized networks that you can gateway to.)

What this means in practice for Urbit and Matrix: if both Urbit and Matrix succeed, a gateway is inevitable. It's inevitable because (a) it will be demanded and (b) no one can prevent it. Then, Urbit will benefit from Matrix's network effect and vice versa.

So economically, we're not competitors. We're colleagues. So building a positive relationship is a professional no-brainer. In the new decentralized world, the only reason to be a jerk to someone else is that you're actually a jerk. You'll see this, but it isn't common -- at all.

(However, our domain is googleable and yours isn't. Owned! We'll just have to link to you :-)