Danah Boyd’s take on the emergent Twitter alternatives is worth the read. I think a point not made is whether the emergent service is driven to dominate the world or satisfied to meet a niche. Case in point is micro.blog, which appears to aspire to nothing more than nurturing a relatively small community and yet I assume it generates enough revenue to cover costs and provides enough income for it’s employees. The ideas of “enough” and “nurturing” are what is missing behind nearly all of the alternatives except for perhaps Mastodon, which appears to be dedicated to nurturing an open source alternative.