Early on, twitter seemed to be aiming for a much more open ecosystem with an eventual range of 3rd party clients and such. If twitter was an open protocol, instead of a company, it probably would have that.

I suspect that an as open protocol, it would be withstanding the current political problems of social media much better. Wikipedia, rss podcasts, the www, email... these are all pretty unscathed relative to twitter or fb. A lot of this comes down to user control.

Building on twitter or fb's platform isn't good enough. We badly need these networks to be displaced by open protocols. I suspect it's too late though. FB is already a too big to fail, economically. Ironic, considering their whole function could be filled bu a non-company or companies several order of magnitudes smaller.

Whether your problem is too much abuse or too much canceling, your problem is protocol squatters like fb and twitter. You have far fewer of these problems in your podcast feed, email, on wikipedia or whatever. It's not that culture problems don't exist. They exist everywhere, but the protocols don't amplify them like platforms do.