Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. People have been building Twitter competitors since the day Twitter launched.
You haven’t seen them because nobody is using them and telling you about them.
The subtext in your comment seems to be that if someone built a perfect technical clone, everyone would switch to it. That’s not what happens. People don’t choose a social media service based on a feature set. They go where their friends are. MySpace was hot garbage compared to Friendster and other competitors at the time. Didn’t matter.
Yeah, the bot problem has gotten significantly worse under Elno, many of his followers are bots (and clearly so, yet he has no problem with them), his paid “identity verification (without the verification)” created an explosion of bots which he apparently liked enough to expand it out into his “pay for clout” initiatives that are going to create a Twitter discourse entirely controlled by bots… it’s pretty clear he doesn’t care about (actual) bots. I think you’re right and he uses “bots” the way his fellow right-wing travelers use “NPC” to deny the basic humanity of those who disagree with them.
