Last updated July 2024

TL;DR — we want to have a simple set of public guidelines that we can use to reduce Farcaster username (fnames and channel names) abuse, not to take usernames away from individuals that have been early and engaged users of Farcaster.

Other notes

• Users looking for a more decentralized and user-controlled namespace should consider using ENS with Farcaster.
• Channel usernames do not have a decentralized option at this point in time.

We believe it’s pragmatic to actively manage clear abuses of the Farcaster namespace. The spirit of this policy is rooted in something is better than nothing and done is better than perfect—the policy is not intended to be a completely exhaustive set of rules and edge cases. We also believe that this can’t effectively be automated; it will require some human judgement.

1. Impersonation - If you register a username that belongs to a well-known public person or entity, we may de-register your name. e.g. @elonmusk, @vitalikbuterin, @google or @whitehouse.

2. Inactivity — If you’re not actively using* a username **for 60+ days, we may de-register it on request from another user or at our discretion.

There will inevitably be reasonable conflicts, e.g. your name is Vitalik and you register @vitalik and Vitalk Buterin sign ups after you. Here’s how we would think about it:

• most importantly, we’ll take into account how active and engaged the existing user is on Farcaster
• the reasonableness of the existing user’s claim, i.e. if your name is Steve Smith and you register @vitalik, that’s less reasonable
• the owner of the ENS and Twitter username, e.g. in this case Vitalik Buterin owns vitalik.eth but not @vitalik on Twitter; if a user already owns both the ENS and Twitter username, that strengthens their claim

Ultimately, it will be a judgement call—but our guiding principle is to bias toward existing, active users using a username in reasonable way.