I think Elon is demolishing Twitter in a controlled way, and BlueSky and Nostr are intended to compete to create a new, better solution than a single one would be on its own. Nothing makes me think this more than the Streisand effect of banning Nostr promotion by name way back in December. Musk knew what he was doing.
Discussion
Interesting theory, I've considered this and could get behind it too. Still seems like an expensive way to go about it on Musk's end.
To me it just seems like business thinking and no bad intentions. It may not be the type of decision we agree with but that’s his way of doing what he feels is best for the platform and for the people on it.
Maybe I’m wrong but it feels like a lot of the hate for him and Twitter in general is overblown.
You can never satisfy everyone, especially with bold changes. People will leave regardless.
I actually think Twitter has improved. Community Notes is probably the best thing that's happened to Twitter. No more "fact checking" from govt sponsored orgs.
I don't think he is entirely to blame here, as it is not possible for any private company to fulfill the promises he made regarding free speech and have a fair platform for everyone. They are bound to face bans in multiple countries.
Or, Twitter’s replacement has been predestined and is being dismantled the way darpa was disbanded the exact day FB went online and then a bunch of darpa employees ended up working for FB.
Or, a certain former twitter exec is donating tons of money to and is a very early adopter of nostr and Elon just doesn’t like competition.
Or, both.
Yours is a very insightful and slightly disturbing (to me) observation. I hope nostr pans out. I hope Twitter pans out for that matter, because competition and choice is good. I’m obviously on nostr, but I’m under no illusions that it is better or worse than anything else. Open source and blockchained or not, all the platforms start out nice and then the evil creeps in. For example, I’ve already gotten spam in replies to my posts. It’s there forever, inmutable. I reported it on Damus, but to what end. The only thing worse then them not doing anything is the idea that someone could do something because then nostr is just a purple bird replacing a blue one.
Said this before, I think he bought an app with a large instal base to build a super app, Tesla rideshare, paypal/cash app competitor, and how people communicate short messages on it, he really won’t care once that’s built.
So he's flushing 44B of his (and some other investors) money down the toilet just like that? I find it hard to believe. 🤔
Most Elon companies were subsidized by US government. Maybe this is just a government attempt to demolish twitter and all the ideas plebs are creating there to go against the current system.
If they can make trilions of follars disappear who knows where, what is stopping them to subsidize Elon to demolish free speech. It is exactly what he's doing right now.
This was more of a "send note" situation than anything else.
twitter can become a bluesky server overnight