So one owned by a company is better? No. This is why .eth domains are great. Ethereum solving yet another problem that HN complains about on the daily, but will still claim it has no usecase.
The ones like .eth or .bit are a bad joke. If you want something that's truly yours, generate a .onion.
"Use an .onion" is genuinely better advice. (I wouldn't do that either, but an .onion at least has a reason to exist.)
It's leaking out into normal DNS.
No, it isn't. I'd never seen a .eth link anywhere on the normal web, yet I've seen plenty of Gemini:// urls, just to throw in something niche for comparison.
You've discovered network effects in the the wild!
Are there really millions of people who use the ENS? Do you have a source?
I have no dog in this fight, I'm just curious.
How many of those aren't the owner?
How many of those aren't bots?
(Flip those last two questions as you'd like; I wasn't sure which would be more illuminating.)
If by nobody you mean "no one outside of the mainstream", sure. But I don't need a lot of work to have my .eth domain resolving to an IPFS file, and there are browser extensions that will let you query ethereum blockchain and use it to resolve IP addresses based on ENS.
A lot of them clearly have value, as the "desirable" eth domains sell for thousands of dollars.
> "Use an .onion" is genuinely better advice. (I wouldn't do that either, but an .onion at least has a reason to exist.)
You seem to be extremely biased against anything related to cryptocurrencies
As for numbers:
> In April 2023, Brave Browser reported 57.27 million monthly active users.
> There are more than 21 million monthly active users of Metamask.