The following is a form of public square or can be made into one:

* Fediverse
* Email
* HTML pages

Twitter is NOT the public square because it is *physically* owned by Elon Musk. You can't start a Twitter instance.

Hence why the Fediverse is not the same as Twitter.

For example, on Mastodon, you can easily migrate to whatever instance is of your choosing, or you can host your own instance if you're willing to put in the work.

Someone might say, "But people can own a Fediverse server."

Sure, but a key difference is that the Fediverse is built for redundancy.

Twitter has no redundancy.

If it were to have anything resembling redundancy, it would be Mastodon -- which is decidedly NOT Twitter.

You can set up a Fediverse server if you wanted to do that, which would build more redundancy.

You can't set up your own version of Twitter, though.

Thus, Twitter is *not* the public square -- but the Fediverse is.

Some folks also say, "Wherever the public congregates, that's the public square."

I don't think that applies to Twitter.

When I say that Twitter is *physically* owned by Elon Musk, that's not a small thing. It's actually a big deal.

And that should tell you a big difference between the Fediverse and Twitter right there.

No one can pull the plug on the Fediverse.

You can go ahead and say the public square is wherever the public congregates. But that means nothing when -- not if -- Elon Musk decides to pull the plug, and everything disappears.

Everything you do on Twitter is all under the aegis of Elon Musk's whims.

Nobody owns the Fediverse.

Nobody stops you from downloading all manners of Fediverse software -- almost all which is free -- and running it yourself.