How can open social protocols fail us?

I put together an analysis comparing several specific failure modes between Farcaster, Bluesky, and Mastodon.

Please let me know if any of the protocol descriptions could be presented more fairly!

https://shazow.net/posts/open-social-2025/

I think this is the most interesting point of comparison. The AppView monolith is a privately funded public good: someone needs to pay a few million dollars a month to run it, and if this subsidy stops the costs must be socialized. Who pays what and why? It's more like a government.

Merkle subsidizes Farcaster too, but no dependency is quite so central. The goal is to grow an ecosystem of private actors incentivized to internalize the network costs themselves. It's more like an economy. And if the subsidy stopped, we know who might pay and why. 

Economic activity is itself a form of diversity and decentralization.

I'm eth newbie..just learning
(working on @farcaster)

terminally.online

This makes me wonder about culture: is it upstream or downstream of this structure? "Run Farcaster more like a government" would not play well here and "Bluesky should be more like a market" would not play well there.

And I think it helps explain some cultural affinities, even within crypto.

Summer of Protocols

Command economies are 0-sided markets

Corporatist economies are 1-sided markets

Neolib economies are 2-sided markets

Protocol economies* are 3-sided markets

* “Protocolized” = post-Coasean sophistication of relations among firms, market and law

Protocols = active boundary layers

would love to put these architectures in vgr’s framework for comparison

would love to put these architectures in vgr’s framework for comparison 

https://warpcast.com/vgr/0x2abac79e