ALT Twitter is a neat illustration of the problem with benevolent dictatorships: they work well, but fail badly. Because they are property — not protocols — they can change hands, and overnight, you get a new, malevolent dictator who wants to retool the system for extraction, rather than collaboration. By contrast, ActivityPub-derived services like Mastodon are open protocols. Users who want new features, or changes to existing ones, can either unilaterally implement them (if they have technical skills or capital to hire technicians); or they can appeal to others to implement them. This is clearly still a two-tier system. People with skills or capital can make the changes they want, while people lacking both have to appeal to others to take up their cause. But whatever the defects in this system, it is still vastly superior to the way Twitter works, both pre- and post-Musk. In the pre-Musk era, users could only make changes by appealing to a largely benevolent — but thin-stretched, opaq