Lauren WeinsteinNow comes the interesting part. In the face of Meta's Threads, does Musk change his behavior with #Twitter -- pricing, verifications, moderation, etc. in any ways?
DamnKimberlee@lauren he won’t. He’s not worried about stats, advertisers or money. Elon’s whole purpose is to destroy public trust and the virtual town square.
Brian Grinter@damnkimberlee @lauren Elon is going to rise the burning carcass all the way til the end
Nour Agha 
@lauren Only thing that will revive his platform and put it on the competitive stage is ActivityPub or AT protocol. Otherwise it's dead in the water, especially once Threads launches AP.
@Nour Or governments cracking down on Meta for privacy issues. And that could easily happen.
@lauren I'd hope so, but they're going to dodge a lot of scrutiny once they federate, pointing to the ability and freedom of users to migrate elsewhere while benefiting from a firehose of content from federated servers without having to deal with the legal responsibilities of hosting all of that data.
Mirishuli@MiriShuli @Nour Regulation *is* coming. There are already a variety of fully bipartisan "Big Tech Hate" bills. The only question is how SCOTUS will deal with various of them, which is hard to predict.
@Nour @lauren This court has already proven it’s bought and paid for by the likes of Harlan Crow and the racists. Feinstein and Grassley haven’t a clue what kind of legislation needs to be written and whatever is written will be rendered useless. So the fact that it *is* coming is a ruse. Sorry, the last 7 yrs has left me without any hope.
kkeller@Nour @lauren if Musk won't let people use his API, he definitely won't let Twitter do ActivityPub.
But even if he did, I wouldn't be surprised if many existing ActivityPub instances preemptively blocked Twitter's instances. People are already talking about doing so for Threads, which is just "normal" level malicious. Musk's Twitter is so much more genuinely evil.
spherulitic@lauren I bet he does, in the most knee-jerky and stupid way you can imagine.
KahunaDaKine@lauren That would require him admitting he was wrong in any way, the odds of which these days are between being struck by lightning and hitting the lottery.
@bkmhang10 Not necessarily. He could just make changes and if questioned just say they were part of his plan all along.
Bill D@lauren I don’t always like capitalism, but when I do it’s because actual competition is happening. It’s been a while!
@lauren I think that comment during his CNBC interview in May is telling: "'Offer me money. Offer me power. I don't care.'” His mind is made up that he's playing N-dimensional chess and has seen so far ahead that he doesn't need to change course.
His lawsuit against Meta for IP infringement reeks of desperation.Threads seems hastily hacked together and leverages Facebook/Instagram infrastructure, which is likely radically different from Twitter's, I doubt he can make a credible case.
Wraithe