I feel Twitter is different from any other social network: it has a social impact, it's the first social network I turn to if I need trustworthy updates from the Italian geoseismic agency, or official updates.
And then I thought, if Twitter asked me a donation to keep running, would I donate?
Also, community in my corner of its social graph is heavily degraded. Everyone tries to make stupid sarcastic jokes and everything else is being shamed and silenced.
So I think it's unrecoverable.
Instead, social media, since it's used as a public place, should be entirely neutral. Therefore it needs to be community-owned and managed. Like, eg. Usenet. In this context, financement for such a social media system could be public (ie. implicit donation thru taxes), or we could explicitely donate, it wouldn't matter.
The US Constitution First Ammendment protects free speech only on the public place. When you enter private space, (and twitter, facebook, the AppStore, etc ARE private spaces), you're bound to the rules established by the owner of the private space.
Social media should be a public space.
TL;DR: Dealing with international law sucks.
In the unlikely event Twitter does go tits-up, you might want to check out the open source GNU Social. The most Twitter- like incarnation of which is at:
In fact, if you're a fan of openness and open source generally, you might want to consider checking out GNU Social. It's actually better than Twitter in some ways (much larger character limit, for a start)