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.

Pretty accurate as measured by protocol metrics. More than this log in but lurk.

Im the guy that posted all those factory memes once

Pretty accurate as measured by protocol metrics. More than this log in but lurk.

https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster

How accurate is that 45k daily users? Is there a public source of this?

Agree, that's basically the theme of the Takeaway section too.

maybe I didn't read enough but why is bluesky paying all that?