&gt; A federated, open twitter platform would be better. Ideal, in fact.<p>Federated platforms don&#x27;t work. We&#x27;ve seen them fail with OpenID, Persona, Usenet and email; I&#x27;m stretching the definition of failed a bit with the latter two but Usenet is a spam- and warez-filled shadow of what it once was and email, well, if you&#x27;re not one of the bigger email service providers good luck ensuring reliable delivery of your messages due to spam, and that IS failure in my eyes.<p>At a certain scale all services, centralized or federated, require massive amounts of money simply to maintain the infrastructure and to prevent &quot;account rot&quot;.<p>Without ads there is no monetizing in free federated services, that is why Persona and OpenID failed.