DNS is really not a good platform to build personal identity on.
For individuals, the cost of losing your domain is far too high if it means losing your identity on multiple services at the same time. And, if nothing else, people eventually die, so domains will be lost by their original owner and then re-used, breaking the notion of identity again in the longer run.
People keep devising more and more involved ways to maintain identities other than your legal one, but if you think about it you can still lose any of those ways (your domain name, your private key, etc.) and in the end no one should use them for anything serious.
And if you take 1000s of judges of different ideologies who could do it, I would rather put my trust in Google that they won't mistakenly ban my account.
Entire brands are built around domain names, and even when not, they’re extremely common in advertising for most brands. To the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars spent to acquire the right domain name.
And yet you seem to be really confused about the difference between DNS and a domain name registration.
Curious.
But I don't know if this is being imagined as "how businesses will communicate on our platform" or it is being treated as "regular users will totally manage their own DNS".
Btw, do you have a better proposal to mitigate the risk of failure to renew domain registration in time?
If several services recognized your identity by virtue of having the same domain name, the fallout from losing that identity is much worse: you lose access to all these services at once, and whoever gets the domain name next will gain access to all of your followers and have a pre-built history. And if one service decides to ban you, you'll be exactly where you were if your identity was specific to that service.
So, with DNS-based cross-service identities, you are at best in the same place as having service-specific identities, and at worse, much worse off.
Additionally, a service which bans your account will typically not give the same name to a new user, or, even if they do, they will still separate the two identities / cleanup all previous posts. A DNS registrar will absolutely give the same domain to someone else if you stop paying for it, and any services which recognize that as your identity may not even know that a change in ownership has taken place.
Apart from that, I think per-service identities are the best that can be hoped for. If I choose to engage with Facebook, I have to trust them to some extent anyway, so trusting them with my identity on Facebook is probably good enough. If I want to establish that some Twitter identity is the same as some Instagram identity, I can do so by directly referencing them from one another. I don't think we can do much better than that without involving the state.
And there’s already at least one blockchain purpose-built for naming - https://handshake.org/. Worth reading their design notes on how and why it works as it does.
