Twitter doesn't compete in a free market segment. No upstart is going to come along and beat Twitter because they monopolize users' access to their own social networks (if you want to participate in conversations your friends are having, you can't do so from e.g. Mastodon because your friends almost certainly aren't on Mastodon).

The thing is, few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter. Parler was nuked. Gab was almost nuked, but they've managed to survive.

There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many politicians are doing everything in their power to crush those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.

Huge demand is maybe an overstatement. A quick google search shows me that Parler had ~4 million active users a couple weeks ago. Twitter has >300 million. That’s about 1-2%. I don’t think that qualifies as huge.

4 million people is a lot of people.

As someone else pointed out, their user base tripled before they were nuked.

Parler had 12 million users at the time it was executed by Amazon.

There's a demand for service for narcissists, but it isn't huge. Twitter was becoming irrelevant and the only thing that brought Twitter back from irrelevancy was that POTUS was big user of it.

>few other companies will do business with anyone trying to compete with Twitter.

That's because companies don't want associated with the users on those platforms, many of whom left Twitter because twitter didn't want them either.

So businesses aren't simply in some evil cahoots with Twitter. They're associated with Twitter because that the users they do want to associate with.