Is Twitter still going to be the same for building audience after being sold to Musk?

It sure will have an impact. Whether it's for the better or the worse we will have to see. Until then I find this whole outrage "I leave!" thing a bit unfounded.

Many people will try Mastodon (or other federated solutions) and will realise it comes with own set of problems - that are not necessarily that much better. (like oversight, power of moderation, potentially overhead of operation).

It does make room for new players - but I am not holding my breath.

I still have hope that some good things might happen at twitter itself. (edit tweets, better user verification to reduce spam/scams). And maybe the freedom of speech absolutism will be superseded by the realism needed to run such a platform.

Well, hopes die last...

I think it's not Elon owning Twitter per se that will lead to big changes.

It's Twitter being converted to a private company again that will really shake things up.

Hope he keeps most things as they are.

I don't see why not.

If Twitter sells to Elon, I expect there to be some changes. Some people will probably get upset and some will leave the platform, but at the end of the day, I don't see the fundamentals changing that much, so building an audience should remain the same.

I don't think it will make any difference. Most of the people that use Twitter today do not know neither give a damn who runs or owns Twitter. I personally have been there for a while and know that there is one "Jack" that is part of the original team there and the rest of the board (or whatever that group of people is) is bananas for me. I know nothing about them, neither I care. I think it reflects the mindset of the most of the users out there.

A lot of my TL wants to leave. I don't know if Mastodon will import your tweet history but it seems like there are two opportunities presented:

• a micro social network alternative that imports your tweets
• an app that aggregates and digests multiple kinds of other communities into a cohesive unit.

I use Mailbrew already, it's a good opportunity for them to take advantage of. Slack and Discord both have well documented APIs. I even digest a Discord channel for my app to send to members weekly.

At least for myself and some others in my circles I feel like there has been a slow but steady migration into private networks maintained in Slack, Discord, and Circle.so. There are 3 Discords I'm in with just friends, including one I started. None of the current major apps are really amazing at maintaining a community, maybe Circle comes closest but for example it does not offer native apps. Discord offers events and other tools for communities but threading isn't great slash it's still a deluge of messages (same w/Slack). Slack is hard for huge communities slash designed for working. Slack is easiest to extend and automate. Circle is better for events and keeping up async (email digests, popular posts, event announcements).

Probably. It'll take quite a while for things to actually change on Twitter if they do at all.