Making a Twitter clone is probably moderately hard. Doing so in a decentralized way is very hard.

Why would anyone fund a startup to reproduce something that’s already wildly popular and successful and still not producing a great ROI?

Twitter is hard enough technically, but the global compliance/regulatory challenges must be daunting.

I have a feeling that Twitter could be politically important enough to have one or more governments reign them in unless Musk manages to calm things down or drive it into the ground.

The smartest thing he could do is find some pretext to remove his public persona from the daily operations. He's clearly in over his head (micro managing policy etc) and business sense alone should tell him that.

Post.news and t2.social are two startups under way

> Where are all the startups?

Before: Twitter was everywhere - any clone would fail.

Now: Twitter is still everywhere. Seems like drug for journalists.

Mastodon is not really a twitter clone, there's a lot of features they disagree with and don't want.

gaining 5000 users per hour all day today. it's an utter disaster for Musk, pretty much it