Telehash is radically decentralized. How do you get a firehose out of that? It would be more like a point to point garden hose wouldnt it? I would like to be proved wrong, but I think Twitter/centralized and Telehash/decentralized will end up looking and acting like two very different services.

If the Twitter as an API group had won out the two best outcomes I can think of are either a buy out from Google, or a move to a foundation like Wikipedia. Google could afford to carry it, like it does Youtube, just so they could own a huge firehose of information and use it elsewhere in search ads, without trashing the stream with ads.

Needless to say founders looking to get rich wouldn't go for the low returns of the foundation model but it would have been the best possible outcome for the well being of the future Internet having and open, censorship resistant message bus and API, assuming you could get enough donors to support it.