@stephancill
One takeaway from the time I've spent on farcaster watching it evolve is that "product led protocol development" is an incomplete methodology for building a durable protocol that is aligned with its users and resistant to misaligned actors.
I suspect a more complete version is comprised of three phases: 1. product led protocol discovery followed by 2. a protocol implementation and finally 3. a migration.
In other words, the initial phase is for bootstrapping the network and discovering protocol requirements – it's actually more useful if this phase executed on centralized infrastructure to increase the likelihood of reaching scale (decentralized rails slow you down and invites a lot of politics)
At some point you need to extract the requirements to build a decentralized protocol that distributes power, and finally migrate the bootstrapped network to the decentralized stack
Twitter/bluesky is the closest attempt at *product led protocol discovery and implementation* in the social space. Unfortunately they failed at the last hurdle