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.

Sorta, I tried to avoid talking about "decentralization" and talk about specific failure modes.

The PLC is a signed ledger, sequencing is effectively centralized. Is Snapchain's validator set decided by JSON signatures on Github much better? Maybe, but social coordination is required either way and it wouldn't be a huge lift to improve either one in a black swan event.

Btw the final paragraph is my exercise for you. :)