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It is a public utility.

it's a "private" utility. But I take your point.

If they remove all the fat making a tweet page 5mb it could be hosted for nearly nothing by some FOSS org.

Except for all the backend connecting each user's messages to their followers. That's no mean feat. And certainly would cost more than "nearly nothing".

Yes, Twitter's backend is actually quite sophisticated.

It's one thing to build a very small Twitter clone for you and your friends, it's quite another to scale that up to hundreds of millions of users and keep everything running smoothly.

But that's exactly what is what as the beginning. Twitter spent a significant amount of its early days sitting on the Fail Whale screen. Sure, now it's stable, when you throw a complete rewrite, and millions of dollars at it.

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