Elon Musk is Killing the Bird With a Paywall, Not Just Walled Gardens
AS already noted in passing several times in Daily Links (both headline and in-line editorial comments), Twitter is no longer free to use. Now it's worse than just walled gardens [1, 2]. In some countries there is a paywall for participation and one of those is a very poor country (Philippines), so even a dollar a year is something that can significantly diminish the userbase. Not everyone has a bank account, but many people have a "smart" phone with "apps" or some Web browser.
Social control media in general has been struggling for years (no growth; many people leave or become vastly less active). Expect this trend to carry on.
A decade ago the share of Twitter in the Philippines was measured at 20% (may not be accurate) and now it's less than 3%. It's worth noting the Twitter ban in Indonesia (or wholesale block as noted in the media some months ago). ASEAN is relatively good at adopting GNU/Linux [1, 2] (Africa also), but it won't be a boon for Twitter/X. It's going to become extinct there. Adding fees for usage will accelerate the extinction. Twitter is not run by a genius but an arrogant fraudster whose main source of income is the US taxpayer.
As a side note, the sales announced by Apple have been awful (as usual, reality is far grimmer than Apple puts it) and the US economy quickly sinks deeper into debt (almost 2 trillion dollars borrowed since summer). If Twitter was ever worth 44 billion dollars, it must have been many years ago. Twitter is more or less worse than worthless; it's a conduit of self-promotion for Elon Musk, but also a source of endless losses. █