Building a little space at /thenextwave and watching everything on /videolab.

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/

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

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

Ethereum

Great read, small typo `shazow.bsky.socialf`

What is your recommendation for people who are looking to invest / commit to an open social protocol -- which would you recommend (could be more than one), and where would you deploy resources to improve that protocol?

Ok crazy idea but hear me out: Make Farcaster compatible with atproto, become the first full alternate AppView to BlueSky with sovereign identity on ENS and built in payments and mini apps.

Pushed a fix, ty!

My fav thing about Farcaster is the sovereign ID, onchain key management, and native payments/onchain operations. My fav thing about Bluesky is ATProto and the layered architecture that can be scaled separately (DID -> PDS -> Relays -> AppView).

It's a controversial take but I suspect there is a "better than the sum of its parts" synthesis here! It would be a far smaller change to bring Farcaster to a mostly-Bluesky-compatible ATProto than the reverse. Think of it like Threads coming to Mastodon: https://warpcast.com/shazow.eth/0xd76e8ff3

That said, if I were to "invest" long term, I'm not very bullish on public global social feeds. On a 10+ year timescale, my bet would be on new kinds of private group chats that cross-pollinate and publish public byproducts. My fav things about Farcaster are likely still relevant here!

friendly neighborhood shitcaster // working on @pinetree

1. Why on Earth did I find this thread 4 months later? :-)

2. Re: "new kinds of private groups", what do you think about this?

Dad, geek, conversation liquidity provider. @l--o--l | @wdimapp

To be clear, the advantage of doing this in ATProto using a custom lexicon namespace is you get to reuse all the same relay infrastructure. In effect, you don't have to run the equivalent of a full hub to add some custom functionality feed for your own app.

Finally got a chance to read! Sounds a lot like ATProto's lexicon namespaces? Except the bundles are aggregated/immutable, which I think loses some utility of shared relay infrastructure. (An "L2" would need to run its own infra, at which point I'm not sure why Farcaster needs to be involved? There's no "inherited security" or atomicity benefits of being a based rollup, right?)

High level, I think this is a design flaw of the Farcaster protocol: Everything is assumed to be in the main namespace and always "alive", there's no notion of segmenting namespaces and there's no notion of immutable archives.

For example, say we take your sports app scenario but instead apply it for archiving casts. Anything more than 90 days old gets "rebundled" into an immutable archive, freeing up "alive storage" that is otherwise more expensive. I think this is a fine idea but it would break today's assumptions and I think it's culturally opposed to what Farcaster leadership wants this to be. (Maybe I'm wrong?)

I guess high level, it's not clear to me what the "layer" relationship is between the L1 and L2 here. To me it sounds more like an "offchain"/"onchain" relationship, rather than a rollup-style relationship.

But considering it from a consumer/builder perspective: Say I'm making an "offchain" live sports for realtime chatting, leveraging the Farcaster social graph... why would I even post it back onto Farcaster after at all? Who benefits?

1. Why on Earth did I find this thread 4 months later? :-)

2. Re: "new kinds of private groups", what do you think about this?
https://blog.vrypan.net/2024/06/26/farcaster-l2/