This is really the only correct answer. If there’s no alternative people are willing to switch to, then the site can crash and chug and go down for weeks, lose most of its current maintainers, and people will keep using it regardless. And so far, there has been little signs that Twitter is actually losing users. The number of app downloads for Twitter has risen since Musk took over, and people are dumb enough to pay $8 for Twitter Blue just to shitpost with a parody account.
And as long as there’s users on the platform, as long as government officials, journalists and company representatives keep using it to make public statements, as long as other websites, chiefly among them news sites, keep using Twitter as a primary source for information, then the site isn’t going to stop existing.
Some advertisers might be attempting to get PR brownie points by announcing they are exiting Twitter, but they’ll eventually all quietly come crawling back if the userbase remains. Ultimately, they have to advertise in places where people are going to place their attention, otherwise they can’t fool people into buying their products.
And as for employees – I have no doubt in my mind that there’s enough people out there willing to exploit themselves to work in such a job. Tesla could not exist otherwise, and it runs on exactly the same model that Musk is now forcing Twitter into. There’s also a tendency to outsource IT jobs to Asia, and as much as Western Mayos may like to believe that they are superior and/or irreplacable, Asian people aren’t stupid, and can generally match their work output any day of the week.
The only thing that could take down Twitter is a viable competitor. Mastodon hardly qualifies. as it’s a distributed system for community networking, like Reddit, not a centralized, international, public shoutbox like Twitter. It simply doesn’t serve the same purpose.
