What was Musk's biggest bugbear about 'old' Twitter? The moderation system. If Twitter goes under, the only practical alternative at the moment is Mastodon, and Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway. He doesn't have much to lose in this scenario: Financially, he'd remain a very rich person. One can argue he'd be better off without Twitter anyway.
WeChat: "am I a joke to you?"
Seriously, Zuck wishes he had the kind of daily center-stage that WeChat has in their customers' lives. Totally guarantee that if Twitter officially folded they'd at least make a play and they might well come out on top.
WeChat is absolutely the #1 beneficiary of any Twitter collapse scenario - which is one of China's reasons for lending Musk all that money. It's win-win, either they own musk and twitter (they've already got him banning chinese journalists and pushing the state position), or twitter collapses and they get a play at WeChat 2.0 for the western market.
Russia is the other big player in Musk's loans... not sure if there's an immediate benefit to them from collapse, but, if it succeeds they'll have a similar venue for psyops and misinformation campaigns at a minimum, plus potentially some direct leverage just like china.
> Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway.
Oh, not only does Mastodon have moderation but it's worse than that: mastodon is effectively community moderation. The problem of edgelord shit (literally edge, finding the exact boundary of the law/written policy/etc and dancing around it) is that everyone knows it when they see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy. But if you're an edgelord nazi or kf'er you'll just get banned from pods, or pods will refuse to federate with you at all. People have no obligation to play the tap-dance with you around what the exact boundary is, if you wanna be an edgelord fuck then get banned. Hell you'll get put into banlists (like ublock lists) that servers will subscribe to and block you everywhere.
This is not government censorship after all, just good old fashioned O(1) moderation. I'm sure you know what would happen if you posted nazi shit in your local discord. What the fuck bro *kick*. And if the "nazi pod" forms, that will get filtered out of everyone's peering.
Social media always adapts whenever the social norms or group expectations (for a particular community) are too at-odds with the moderation policy. When someone turns into a badmin and violates community norms, as musk is doing by inviting nazis and shit back onto the platform, the community will melt away and re-form somewhere else that aligns with the social norms. And the thing is, now that you've moved away from centralized moderation, there is no one single finely detailed moderation policy for you to play games with, it's just what the hachyderm admin or whoever wants to set as their policy, it's different on a per-pod basis, and a lot of those people aren't going to be inclined to play footsie with nazis or KF'ers. It's transgressive/edgelord content precisely because most people don't like it, after all.
Mind elaborating on this? Would be a shame if something so important got lost in all the noise.