horsefacts 🚂
@horsefacts.eth
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.
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horsefacts 🚂
@horsefacts.eth
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.
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avi
@avichalp.eth
would love to put these architectures in vgr’s framework for comparison https://warpcast.com/vgr/0x2abac79e
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shazow
@shazow.eth
I think there are echoes of the "rollup centric" vs "giant solana monolith" debate here too. Is it feasible to scale and operate a monolithic social network that costs millions per month? Are there more architecturally efficient approaches where the costs don't need to be uniform and optimized for different conditions? I don't think it's a matter of government or market, the outcome is the same either way: Either money/resources run out or they don't. Maybe the really expensive part is not important to be expressed in the expensive way.
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boscolo.eth
@boscolo.eth
It is hard to compare the two platforms apples to apples. Reducing ATproto down to just AppView misses some important nuance. There is a second community called Blacksky that is based on a Rust port of the Bluesky code. It has almost as many users as Farcaster. If Bluesky shut down, Blacksky could probably continue to operate.
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