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!

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/

nice write up

Is the PLC sovereign right now? I thought it was placeholder / controlled by the core team.

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

Seems much more centralized than Farcaster is today (our smart contracts don't have admin keys that can change the data)

for the example you site, the same is true for PLC. You have to have the keypair that created the DID:plc to update the DID:plc.

why does that matter for the example you sited?

Once you have a DID it's cryptography that defines how valid it is.

Can I inspect the PLC code? Is it possible for a human to change it?  How would I tell if they did? Can they change anything or are they constrained? What happens if the web service is unavailable? How redundant is it? Who pays the bill to keep it running?

A smart contract seems better on all of these dimensions.