if ENS is supposed to be the “hub” of your identity, why does every web3 social platform have their own namespace?

Founder, gamma.io • AI/ML @ Stanford, ex-Apple

Didn’t see that Farcaster v2 allows you to use ENS instead of a proprietary name. That’s seems like a great balance. It’d be cool to be able to refer to a user by their ENS even if they have a Farcaster name, though; would help discoverability

This seems a little incongruent with the next message, though — that’s an incentive for the company rather than the user.

I also feel this justification is what’s led to the demise of protocols over platforms (why reuse something when we can do it in-house)

I’m a little skeptical that the namespace is what’s valuable, rather than the graph of connections and set of interactions. 

though there’s something to be said about being early to a platform and getting the name you want, and so there is some incentive structure there

because it’s the most valuable piece of digital real estate. 

If I’m a platform, why would I co-opt someone else’s namespace if I can create a value system native to my own platform to make you keep coming back?

They’ll all just be subdomains in the end imo

ENS can't be identity, it's transferable.

One of the primary ways a user identity themselves in CharmVerse is ENS. We think that’s the right way to build a web3 platform

“Fat Protocol Theory” - the value capture is in a protocol, not the individual apps that are built on top. So if a social platform wants to monetize long term (and not have to rely on an ads based business model), they need to have control over their namespace.

We've yet to see true Web3 identity (years to come), but it's ok for platforms to try and become hubs for now. ENS is not "the" hub, rather part of a massive on/off chain graph that users control split between personas including private, public, and pseudo reputations.

ENS is expensive. Don’t think will work for markets like India, SEA