Musk has just paid $44 billion for a loss making business he has no idea what to do with, didn't want to buy in the first place, and whose advertisers customers are very sensitive to the potential harm being linked with a covid denying, pro-Republican internet troll who has suggested allowing Russia to annexe parts of Ukraine and giving Taiwan to China might do to their reputation...Hallucigenia wrote:I'm certainly not saying that Twitter has some kind of right to exist, that it will last forever. Just look at Altavista in search, or MySpace in social media. But at the same time, it now has a sufficiently big network that whatever replaces it would have to be more than just "a bit" better than Twitter - or Twitter has to get a lot worse (Musk is doing his best). There doesn't seem to be an equivalent right now - Mastodon seems to be the nearest but it has its quirks and lacks the instinctiveness of Twitter, it's a bit like Twitter for Linux - so they seem to be setting it up as a backup rather than using it day to day.
All sorts of things with big networks persist even if they're demonstrably not as good as some of the alternatives. A classic example is Brunel's insistence on using a 7' gap between the rails of the GWR - to allow more powerful engines, a more stable ride and more freight capacity - but they were reduced to the 4'8.5" spacing of the rest of the network by 1892.
There's no good 'previous' to compare this to. Whatever replaces it, in whatever time frame, might not have to be better just solvent. There's also a significant movement to re-de-centralise the internet which isn't going to help the established players, least of all Twitter which has a meagre 250 million active users, and that's before you discount all the extra bot accounts Musk was so insistent existed and the fact that whatever he decides to do with Twiteer they've just fired half the people who make and maintain the code...