Feels like Amazon could eat Twitter's lunch here (especially since they, allegedly, run Twitter's servers now, meaning that they could handle the traffic).
So why would Amazon or any other company want to invest in their own version of that?
Amazon, on the other hand, has no such dissonance and has a very profitable advertising arm that could happily benefit from yet more digital real estate. Of all the players out there, Amazon already does massive hosting AND competent ad scheduling across diverse device ecosystems. It just seems like they've got all of the technical side pretty much already up and running; they just need to strap it together in a specific package and ship it.
I know - easier said than done; and who knows what other priorities they're worried about that might not cooperate with owning a "digital town square". For all I know, there's some monopoly law that they'd have to screw with, too.
But all of this is to say: they seem well-positioned, so I'm just idling musing on why they haven't capitalized on it. Your reasoning is as good as any other I've heard. /shrug
Amazon has spent decades building the complete opposite culture of what it takes to successfully run a social network.
Social media sites are a sort of grayweb at this point in history.
The fediverse is based on a protocol called ActivityPub, just like email is a based on SMTP. ActivityPub is designed from the ground up to allow any number of federated servers to share posts. Email servers can run Postfix or Exim (or others), and the fediverse servers can run Mastodon or Pleroma (or others).
One of the joys of the fediverse is that it's possible (and easy) to move your account (posts, followers etc) to another server. So when a particular server gets too busy, people simply migrate to another server, or even set one up themselves. Universities are already setting up their own fediverse servers for their staff and students, and I think we'll see companies following suit soon - again echoing the growth of email.
So that's the theory - what about real world? Thanks to Elon's unique management style, Mastodon active users (a good proxy for load) have gone from 370K to 2,500K in two months. I use it daily, and it's no slower with all those extra users.
I know it seems like a long way around for not really providing any "value", but the idea is that most people just want "next twitter". They simply aren't going to deal with server instances in the way that, say, the gaming public does. People running businesses, being "influencers", or developing journalistic followings do not get any value from caring about technical implementation. So Amazon's strength, here, is that they could pick up a ton of influential people just by being "easy" and then the followers come for their interests.
In contrast, the operator doesn't even have your phone number, nor demand a major corp email address, both things twitter required. You could log in via tor if you wanted.
Twitter could have sold your data, accidentally leaked it via an API or some cloud bucket, or it could have gone out with the help of a foreign intelligence operative employed there... And you have no hope of proving how or why. Their internal controls were incredibly lax. And the FBI would tell you to go away.
Just because you decentralize won’t make all kinds of scaling easy.