Seizing the means of messenger production

Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, discusses building a decentralized messenger app on top of Urbit, an open-source personal server platform. He explains how each user gets their own virtual machine with a cryptographic identity as their network address, enabling true data ownership and the ability to self-host. The conversation covers the technical architecture differences from centralized messengers like WhatsApp and Signal, the finite address space model for Sybil resistance, and how the system shards compute per user to avoid classic scaling problems. Galen also touches on integrating local LLMs into the platform so users can control their own AI context across multiple models.