The fundamental incentives for Twitter as a business have not changed. It is a free service that needs to convert user engagement into advertising dollars. Unless Twitter moves to a paid model, that will always be true no matter who owns it. And if Twitter fails, any potential replacement will need to deal with the same incentives and solve the same problems Twitter did.
If you signed your message with "This is a reply to msg 33398198 by Timja. Signed: twblalock", then nobody could take this converstion away from us again. I could copy it and put it on any server. Owned by myself or run by some service provider. And it would always be clear to everybody that this conversation really took place between the two of us.
In fact, users could use any service they like.
It would not matter what client you use to reply to me. Your reply would appear on Hacker News, because HN would follow the protocol and accept properly signed comments relayed to it.
In your example HN would still need to retrieve and store billions of messages, handle user authentication, discovery, aggregation, additional data handling (e.g. you want to attach a video, or go live). They will need to monetize _something_. So we are back to square one, just with a much more inconvenient client setup process (like we do right now setting up pop3/smtp/imap).
Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
How much control does Elon actually have? Can he decide to take the company in a direction that don't match the business incentives?
Can he tell an employee: "Do this or your fired" because it may make him feel better? Or because he misunderstood the situation and couldn't be told otherwise until he sees the results? Or both?
Does he have certain responsibilities that he is supposed to honor? What happens if he doesn't?
It’s clear from his recent announcements that he understands how much Twitter depends on advertisers.
>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.
If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.
A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.
With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.