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

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

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