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.

Those are different design choices that have different trade offs, I didn’t make these decisions, I’m just explaining how it is

Farcaster uses decentralized hubs and multiple clients, if you want global usernames you need a global db

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.