this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Your article is a pretty reasonable and fair evaluation of farcaster, but then your post saying crypto/web3 is "mostly really dumb and bad" is not very nuanced. I know a lot of people on Lemmy don't like crypto, and that's what's in the meta right now, but if you are going to give something a fair shake, give it a fair shake, don't just anticipate backlash for covering a crypto topic and preface it with "it's mostly really dumb and bad". Ya there are a lot of scams, and a lot of bullshit projects, but there is a core of really useful infrastructure there, which farcaster is using for self sovereign account registration/ownership.
Seems inefficient, couldn't the same thing be accomplished using local DBs rather than the world's most inefficient ledger?
Farcaster uses decentralized hubs and multiple clients, if you want global usernames you need a global db
What if we don't want global usernames? What if we're entirely satisfied with global user IDs in a DHT?
Those are different design choices that have different trade offs, I didn't make these decisions, I'm just explaining how it is
No worries, I'm merely confident that the tradeoffs necessary to employ a blockchain aren't worth the supposed benefits thereof.
I understand, don't get me wrong, 99% of stuff in crypto is hot garbage, but having a global database that isn't controlled by any one (or even dozen) entities is pretty powerful. The 2 guys that started farcaster could quit, or get hit by a bus, or decide it's not profitable enough and pivot, but at least you have control over your profile still. If reddit was decentralized more, they wouldn't be able to shut down their APIs for 3rd party clients.
Trust me I understand the criticism of block chains, but if we want open source and the internet to thrive and not be controlled by companies, we need a global layer that is neutral.
We already have that, it's called a Distributed Hash Table, no blockchain required.
But there's no global consensus, it's not trustless, and smart contracts unlock a lot of additional composable capabilities.
Trust, consensus, and access control are session-layer issues that don't need to be solved by a transport-layer protocol. Social networks deserve to be able to forget things.
Which is a whole lot of extra engineering that is already taken care of with a blockchain. Whether social networks should forget your username/registration is a different debate.
It really isn't a different debate when you're talking about putting them on the blockchain, and all that other engineering has already been done by other distributed social networks.
Ok, we are talking in circles, you have your opinions, I have mine. If you want to talk about this over voice at any point, let me know, I don't think text is going to get anywhere, and Lemmy has a pretty strong bias against crypto (which I understand, but obviously disagree with)