It turns out Mark Twain didn't say the quote that I was thinking of. Instead, it was Clarence Darrow who wrote the original version: "All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."
I'd wager not all men. I have never read an obituary notice with great satisfaction and I hope I never do. Some men realize that life is fleeting, there is no good and evil, and when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away. Violence doesn't help (unless you're a nation-state) and, for me at least, there's no relief nor joy in vengeance.
when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away
Unfortunately, some people can't shrug and walk away. You can't walk away from racism; you carry your face with you. You can't walk away from an abusive home if you have no money. You can't shrug off the next blow when you're a victim of violence.
Being able to shrug and walk away is an ability to be treasured. Not everybody has it.
I guess I didn't understand what was meant. When I encountered problems based purely on my physical characteristics / ethnicity / nationality I was very upset and my response was to give up and go home for the day. I didn't try to harm the other person and I wouldn't have wanted them harmed.
But nobody ever beat me with a baseball bat. That's a different category of racism that I haven't commented on and that obviously is different from the topic at hand.
As a black person living in America, let me offer my interpretation of GP's statement, then. You can't walk away from racism, because it's always there. It will follow you whether you want it to or not. It's pervasive to the point that even if it's not immediately visible, you can rely on it to surface sooner or later.
Your options are either to exit society altogether or learn to live with it. It doesn't require being beaten with a baseball bat for racism to have a significant impact on your life.
I mean sure: you can't walk away from racism in humans like you can't walk away from narcissism in humans. At some point you'll encounter it.
But I can walk away from a situation in which I'm being treated with racism, or a situation in which a narcissist is playing their zero-sum game against me.
I don't hate the narcissist and I wouldn't enjoy their suffering. I just don't want anything to do with them. Nor the racist.
I press life's "restart" button to get a different interaction with a different person, and that has worked well. Even where restarting is massively inconvenient for me. Because ultimately most people don't treat others with racism and most people don't treat others with "evil", so I'm more likely to get a reasonable person on my next attempt.
I'm glad this has worked for you. Do you understand that many, many people can't just walk away from things? And further, do you understand that talking so broadly but with only your experience in mind may not come across well to others with different experiences?
The OP may appreciate Harold Washington's distillation of the above sentiment about Richard Daley - "I'm not glad he's dead but I'm glad he's gone" (also used by Richard Stallman about Steve Jobs)
The argument put forth isn't that there's a spectrum of good and evil, it's that good and evil don't exist. Presumably along the naturalist lines that we're all just animals doing animal things and morality is a useless fictional construct. An idea I find rather naive.
Good and evil are products of the interpretive mind, one that absolve itself of its own interpretation which leads to the concepts appearing to stand on their own. They're social facts masquerading as common sense, "the way the world works", and reality.
That's not to say there aren't consequences to rejecting them as such, we have a whole system for social fact enforcement that includes social, physical, and mental punishment, but that doesn't mean that one can't appreciate them as social facts either.
Would evil exist in the natural world absent humans? If not, then evil is a property contingent on humans in one way or another.
I'd argue that it's a form of nihilism, and that nihilism itself is at best benign and at worst destructive. You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals". Even acknowledging that partial truth you eventually have to choose a subjective value system to make moral decisions. Perhaps it's a somewhat useful perspective in evolutionary science/research, but that's as far as it goes. I wouldn't recommend it as a life philosophy unless you just want to be an ascetic hermit, and there's a reason ascetic hermits are viewed as more zoo animals than anyone of importance, and they aren't very common or influential. Not that a true ascetic would care, their entire existence is eating their own tails to feel superior.
> You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals"
Of course you can. As long as the animals we are have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions, to themselves and others, and make rational choices about that.
I wouldn't put in prison or on death row a person who killed even a hundred people but functionally has an IQ of 45. That person likely couldn't make rational choices and couldn't understand what they were doing, why they were doing it, or what would happen next.
Whereas I would incarcerate a person with a 100 IQ who drove drunk in a well populated city, whether or not they hit someone.
Good and evil don't have much to do with either case.
The measure of ideas are whatever people can be convinced they are.
The trick is to make it sound like it's not you that's saying it. We launder it through God, society, reality, and it comes out sparkling clean to everyone who's gullible enough to believe it. It's a trick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
I'd agree there is no good and evil in the sense that we don't have any universal agreed upon secular principles to base our morals/ethics on. There are exceptions to almost moral rule you can imagine.
The morals and their exceptions are all people's opinions, and we now live in times where it's practically an act of courage to bother making a fucking decision on whether or not XYZ is morally okay.
The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
I think that depends on your view of evil. One could conceptualize it as the absence of good. It's a subtle distinction, but its implications are far reaching.
That would be a strange definition. Good is deliberately helping others, evil is deliberately harming others.
If no one helped others, but also didn't harm them, life would be still be much better without people doing evil things. For example, no volunteer would clean a beach of other's trash, but also no visitor would pollute the beach intentionally.
Oh I can think of plenty of evil acts that don't involve deliberately harming others.
But at the end of the day the evil-doer doesn't think they're evil and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. And indeed I can't be sure they're an evil person or a person merely committing evil acts or a person committing neutral acts that seem evil to me.
All I can be sure of is that I don't want or need to be around them. It does me no good to hate them or revel in their misfortune. I can be relieved when they stop doing whatever was objectionable to me though.
Yes, there are plenty of edge cases to philosophize about, but for the overwhelming majority of situations, if you intentionally harm others, you're being evil, regardless of how you rationalize it. This implies that everyone is both evil and good to some degree.
Even if you debate the edge cases forever, most of the situations where significant harm was purposefully done would be clearly evil.
Yet it reflects the natural reaction of not deliberately killing someone for the greater good, because people judge that more evil than the neutral position of not intervening.
Also, if you don't intervene, you don't have to answer to the police about why you deliberately killed a man. Murder is murder, even if your intentions were good.
As mentioned by the comment you reply to, this thought:
> Yet it reflects the natural reaction of not deliberately killing someone for the greater good, because people judge that more evil than the neutral position of not intervening.
is quickly disproven through the Trolley problem, since it's literally about deliberately killing someone for the greater good - and the average respondent DOES deliberately kill someone for the greater good.
I believe this is known as ethical subjectivism and it’s not entirely uncommon. What you’re expressing is ethical objectivism. Both are fine and common viewpoints, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to express either with complete and utter certainty. Hopefully someone with more depth in the matter can correct me or add color.
It would appear you are falsely equivocating benefit (which is indeed, subjective) with good; it therefore follows that you also equivocate injury with evil.
While indeed, something beneficial is often considered "good," this does not imply that all good consists in benefit, or that all benefit is inherently good. It would be evil, for instance, for one to benefit by exploiting another. Contrariwise, their mutual co-operation would be good and result in their mutual benefit.
The distribution[0] of your major and minor terms is of great importance when reasoning upon matters as grave as a system of objective morality. One may benefit from good or evil actions. To equivocate between good and benefit in toto is to possess a fundamentally mistaken idea of the principles of objective morality. In so doing, you do not reject objective morality, but rather your misunderstanding thereof.
I was not in fact saying that good must always involve benefit and evil injury. It is obvious that acts which some will categorise as evil can provide benefit, and vice versa.
I was merely saying that there is no objective definition of good and evil independent of human judgement and people do differ in how they ascribe those labels.
Good and evil are constructs in the realms of morals and ethics, which are also constructs produced by society. And so on. If you continue delving into these constructs, you will discover that the only ultimate truth is your firsthand emotional, physical, and mental experience.
Yes, you can map these manifestations to those end-of-the-chain constructs, but does it make them true or real? Or are they merely your personal, fuzzy classifications based on your experience and programming?
Viewed from this perspective, there is neither evil nor good indeed.
That's an absurdly reductionist viewpoint. You might as well say there are no people, only particular groups of molecules that can be fuzzily classified into humans.
It's reductionist, but what makes you say "absurdly"? It's a matter of personal choice which viewpoint to use, and I was just commenting on the original point and the viewpoint provided.
I personally find this reductionism quite helpful in seeing through these layers of constructs and making it my own choice which ones to adopt, rather than simply accepting them all as given.
It's not binary; it is a gradient from actual perceived reality to very distant derivative concepts. For many people (e.g., those who do evil), these concepts obviously don't make sense, so I wouldn't even call it a "common reality." It's just a part of the subjective reality you belong to. If you choose to stay in your part of reality and not engage with those who are outside, that is your decision. It may be a dead end for you, but I'd also caution against generalizing.
Someone who says there's no good and evil has never experienced the presence of evil. That's a form of privilege that rarely gets discussed.
There are some people the world is objectively better off without. The issue of course is who gets to decide that, and under what circumstances. But there's no denying that violence, properly applied, can solve many problems very efficiently.
I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example. I will feel a great deal of relief when Putin and Xi eventually kick the bucket. I feel no need to piss on their graves, but only because I have better things to do.
> I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example.
Sure, and I can be relieved too when specific people, who cause great suffering, die and therefore stop.
Relief is a different thing than taking great satisfaction in it. It's not schadenfraude I feel about their death: it's relief about having one less thing to worry about, not relief at finally getting my vengeance.
I'd say relief and satisfaction are closely linked, arguably two facets of the same emotion. From an evolutionary perspective, it's likely those who gain at least some satisfaction from their adversary's death were more effective at eliminating threats.
If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective. And you can sit still and starve yourself secure in the knowledge that you have logically derived truth and you're not actually hungry, it's just a bunch of chemical signals that signify nothing of importance.
From a more practical perspective, we can all agree that there are more and less desirable states of human life, and that is the context where the term "objectively" is used in common parlance.
I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
> If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective
Maybe, but value is subjective even when you zoom in.
> I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
I never expressed nihilism, I stated that values are subjective, and describing them as objective is incorrect and obscures the source of the practical problem you yourself described with implementing them.
I guess no one should ever user the term "objective" when referring to anything that interfaces with morality then? If I say "curing cancer is an objective good for humanity", you'd wag your finger and call me out there as well?
> I guess no one should ever user the term "objective" when referring to anything that interfaces with morality then?
Correct, they should not.
Where the statement without “objective” is uncontroversial and the discussion touches on nothing else to which objectivity vs. subjectivity is important, it adds nothing but pointless inaccuracy, when the claim is controversial or offered in a context where objectivity vs subjectivity actually matters in some other way, it is harmfully misleading.
> There are some people the world is objectively better off without... I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example. I will feel a great deal of relief when Putin and Xi eventually kick the bucket.
There's nothing "objective" about this at all--this is an extremely Western/US-centric view of the world. Most of China does not consider Xi Jinping an evil person who the world would objectively be better off without.
> Most of China does not consider Xi Jinping an evil person who the world would objectively be better off without.
I'm not sure we have any data on this either way. Most of China doesn't feel like they have the freedom to say anything negative about Xi in any sort of public or recorded way so taking a poll on Xi in China isn't likely to give you a true picture of how people there actually feel about him.
You could just, you know... talk to people. I've spent a lot of time in Korea/Japan and in both of those countries Xi is not hyped up to be evil despot that Western media makes him out to be. There's a very good reason why American media specifically tries to make China seem like an evil empire, and it has to do more with data collection from undersea cables and owning the world's reserve currency than it does good or evil.
If Xi is pure evil, you should be worried about how much investment American companies are receiving from evil CCP-affiliated entities, as well as how much money gets America is spending on evil CCP-sponsored manufacturing...
Pew found that, as of 2020, 84% of Japanese respondents and 83% of South Korean respondents have "no confidence in Xi to do the right thing regarding world affairs," compared to 77% of US respondents.[1]
Violence and revenge are useful tools in many environments. The advantages they provide are why evolution made them prominent in our nature and pretending otherwise instead of accounting for it seems unwise. Our primate cousins famously practice war, genocide, infanticide etc.
Violence in most cases just begets more violence. It's really not a very useful tool. No one's opinion was changed because you injured them or their friends.
Yeah everyone, just shut up and let these people express their opinions by making laws against basic human rights, telling you what's best for you and your children, violently attacking you, marrying 12 year olds, and destroying democracy at ever turn. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Except you of course, you're not allowed to defend yourself.
I get why people build straw men. It saves them from having to deal with complexities; they get the pure feeling of being right. But I think it's especially ridiculous in this context. What's the point of supposedly being strongly for free speech if you're not going to listen to what anybody's actually saying?
I don't understand. I seriously doubt they paid for the company and only then learned it was worthless.
Why buy something and then shut it down because it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up? Why not just build from the ground up and launch the new thing without paying someone for the dead business?
Do they think the brand name will be worth something when the new thing is built?
Because (non technical) investors thought it cannot be that bad. And it was that bad. Parler have made very stupid decisions during their history, such as acquiring some obscure cloud shop.
Exactly. Trump's success at grifting showed that the audience at sites like Parler was made up of (mostly) older people with either substantial disposable income or a combination of fixed income and poor decision-making skills. That's money in the bank to conservative fundraisers.
Reading between the lines, if they're gonna do anything with the data other than sell it as donor lists, the last bit of the article suggests it'll have something to do with AI—I could see this being useful for training certain kinds of propaganda AI (especially training it to strike the right tone and content to get high positive engagement from a certain audience), or, relatedly, donation-request-copywriting AI (get a profile of the potential donor, tune your message to that person specifically to maximize likelihood of donation, that kind of thing)
Presumably they're making profiles for internal use, ad generation, etc. Those profiles, keywords, IP addresses, etc. are the value of the site, IMO, outside of trying to sway consensus further.
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I don't think one connects with the other. Parler is not associated with trump and trump isn't on there. Trump has his own social media site that his heavy duty supporters are going to use.
Trump's success at fundraising doesn't mean that anyone who messages those people looking for money gets it. Assuming trump, massively popular with many conservatives, will be treated the same way as anyone with conservative sounding things in an email is a fallacy that assumes all people giving money to trump are stupid and throw money at emails.
There may be value in the data in building some lists, but I don't immediately assume its political fundraising directly without more evidence. Sometimes influence type operations might not be directly monetary.
I don't know or care about Business Insider, but if you are going to try diminish a source's credibility by calling it propaganda, at least spell the word correctly.
My man, if you don’t know that businessinsider is not a real publication, and are fooled because it has business in the name, then your perspective is so far left that there’s just no getting through. And that’s OK.
This was widely reported by dozens of news outlets. You can take your pick across the political spectrum.
I don't know anything about BusinessInsider, what specifically makes you say they are a propaganda outlet pushing a narrative? And what is the narrative?
There's been a dispute with that landlord since before Elon bought twitter, and not paying rent is Twitter's way of negotiating and other organizations/companies do similar tactics all the time. If you're in a contentious legal situation with another group, withholding payment and making an argument you're allowed to do so under the lease is perfectly normal.
Unfortunately reporting on this is awful and biased and doesn't include nuance like this. It's just "omg twitter is broke and run by an idiot".
Is there something else that's relevant? It's 300+ pages of all the information around the situation, though admittedly biased from the landlord's perspective
I was hoping to read more about the dispute you were talking about.
As far as I can tell the dispute is that twitter didn't pay the rent and the building owner wants them to pay the rent, which is how this has been reported.
Page 3, in the middle of them laying out the timeline:
9 14. On or about November 22, 2022, Plaintiff served Defendant with a demand to
10 increase the LOC by $10,000,000 pursuant to Paragraphs 13 and 25 of the Lease. A true
11 and correct copy of such demand is attached hereto as Exhibit 2 and incorporated herein by
12 this reference. Defendant did not, within the time specified in the notice, or at any other
13 time thereafter, increase the LOC by $10,000,000. Rather, Defendant contended, in
14 response to Plaintiff’s notice, that it was not required to increase the LOC by $10,000,000
15 upon a transfer in control of Defendant under the terms of the Lease.
I don't know many people who believe Twitter is "break even". Musk, who is not known for his fastidious accuracy in statements like this, has a lot of leeway to count and not count different parts of Twitter's cash flow to make a claim like that.
Another thing to keep in mind is the mind-boggling amount of debt service that Twitter has to deal with.
Twitter was profitable before he was involved. Not enormously so but the only reason the previous year was negative was a one-time lawsuit settlement.
The problem is that Musk bought them on credit which added a massive amount of new debt settlement so now they need something close to a billion dollars of new profits annually to be where they were.
Not to be a conspiracy nut, but "Putting the kind of folks who would go out of their way to be on this site on an FBI watchlist" is also a viable business when you're the government and it's your business to track such people.
Olympic media is based out of Arlington, VA.
(Note: No, I don't actually think this is the FBI using government funds to buy a social media site just to know who was using the site. I'm just having fun making up a conspiracy web from whole-cloth).
the subhead is a misquote (as headlines often are), they actually said "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more"
and goes on to say "While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities—even extending beyond domestic politics,"
> Analytics firm SimilarWeb says Parler's website had 851,000 visits on desktop and mobile in the past month. In October, TechCrunch reported that Parler had 250,000 monthly active users on its iOS and Android apps
If either the website or the mobile apps use any one of a large number of ads libraries or analytics toolkits, they get the data which is then packaged and sold.
It was profitable in the relatively recent past. I wonder if had it never been acquired, it could have easily gotten back to that with the same round of layoffs as the rest of the industry had and without all the chaos of added debt, lost advertisers, lost trust, etc.
Lost trust? Twitter was running an industrial censorship complex where dozens of 3-letter agencies were working hand-in-hand with the platform to decide what gets heard and what doesn't. Private citizens were targeted for censorship by government agencies. They deserved no trust to begin with.
To quote Unforgiven: deserve's got nothing to do with it.
However crummy Twitter was pre-acquisition, it was relatively stable with respect to its ad business, which steadily churned along. In that sense it was "trusted" despite any flaws the platform had.
Musk just came in and knocked the pieces off the board and tossed a bunch of the client relations people right out the door, so it doesn't seem like a trustworthy business partner.
If you believe Musk (I'm not sure why anybody would...) he's clawing back those advertising dollars, but it's got to be a questionable way to spend money when the platform is run so chaotically.
turns out most businesses predicated on outrage rarely have a long-term profit viability and frequently turn out to be a nothing more than a grift at best.
Facebook and Twitter at least, to a degree, managed to monetize trigger emotions like rage, fear and sorrow and spin it into a captive, saleable audience receptive to modern marketing that preys almost exclusively on envy, fear, doubt, and personality matrix of the id and superego. the only issue is this sort of thing is generally entropic; culpable for human misery and uncontrollable chaos. it can be seen as having transformed baby boomers into a generation fueled by white-hot rage for anything that defies the most recalcitrant worldview, despite the internets general attempt to expand and broaden the personal horizon. faecbooks inevitable collapse into an exotic and semiliteral "captured audience" in a virtual world no one asked for, and twitters hardline unregulated pantomime of an Ayn Rand cliffnote that literally spends its dying breath tumbling off a cliff of brand and marketing exodus, can be seen as the natural progression and tendency of what i like to call the rage economy.
ironically Parler will likely meet the same fate as twitter, flailing ineffectively with myopic strategic goals to revamp platform aspects or regain trust but with no real directionality outside the latter stages of 'industry that makes people sad or angry for money.' maybe a few name changes (hello Meta) or spicy policy changes ($popular_thing branded as a stage-agent, that aught to show $enemy_group) but the end result is the same.
Poorly engineered social app who's only market was culty political sub-factions doesn't make money. Film at 11.
Q-Anon has lost momentum since the aliens didn't join forces with the military to reinstate Trump on Jan 6, and Trump himself has truth social.
And I imagine most engineers competent enough to make a viable Twitter clone have political objections to working on an alt-right version. But it'll be a good money sink for far-right rich guys with inflated egos.
I don't imagine they paid that much for it. This is a good way to scrub those inadvisable hate posts you and your rich right wing friends made while drunk late at night in the heat of the moment
Underlines in how much turmoil the digital ad market is and also how much Trump means in monetary terms for engagement as he brought his audience to Truth Social.
>Parler declined a 40% stake from Trump after Jan 6, 21.
It doesn't sound like trump offered - it sounds like parler offered and trump didn't accept, since parler wanted exclusivity, and negotiations (which can mean anything) ended after january 6th.
Its also not clear if Kanye was being talked into buying it or he was the origin of that idea - I don't want to make assumptions. A lot of people might be looking to take advantage of an ultra rich person with serious mental health issues. It feels more like the people who built parler weren't making any money and wanted to wash their hands of it with anyone who had enough money to interest them in selling.
Also, Donald Trump has his own version of Twitter in case Musk Twitter is too liberal for you (lol). The only way Parler could have had any niche at all would have been if Kanye bought it, went back on his meds instead of InfoWars, and made it music-focused
If you'd been paying attention you'd see that he has made some good music since the fiasco, though he hasn't released it on traditionally-owned platforms.
Also are you referring to a real incident wrt Netanyahu and his children? I have found no information regarding that.
Ah my bad I didn't realize they stuck to one and not the other, I'd assumed Parler had prettymuch eaten Gab.
edit: I'm rate-limited so can't reply. Grandparent poster had said that now that Musk owns Twitter, there's no longer a reason for Parler to exist. I was meaning to point out that, even in Musk's era of lax moderation and resurrecting the most extremist accounts, they still got banned from Twitter very quickly.
However, my assumption was that since, of the zillions of right-wing Twitter clones (parler, gab, gettr, truthsocial, etc) most had been out of the news other than Parler, than the extremists had flocked to Parler. If Parler booted them as well and they stuck on Gab, that's my mistake.
West literally got banned for posting a swastika. Parler rejected his attempt to buy the platform because of his comments praising Hitler. He embarrassed Trump by bringing Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier to dinner.
I mean, the guy is obviously mentally unwell and this has gotten him hoodwinked into a very awful subculture.
But still, what would you call that?
See also Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, another guy unbanned by Musk, in his own words:
> The goal is to ethnically cleanse White nations of non-Whites and establish an authoritarian government.
It was not a Swastica, it was a blending of a Swastica and a Star of David, accompanied with a "can't we just all have love for one another" message. You may disagree with that, but it's disingenuous to misrepresent the facts to buttress your argument against him.
Any decent argument ought to be able to be presented without the use of lies and deceit.
You should understand that when a Christian such as Kanye (or indeed Jesus) speaks of "Love", it is a very different concept than the secular interpretation. For one, everyone deserves it:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. - Matthew 5:43-45
"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" - Luke 5:31-32
Even the Old Testament (Jewish bible) has similar themes, though the connotation is decidedly more Old Testament:
If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you. - Proverbs 25:21-22
Describing the definition of His love is in some ways a Christian's entire life goal^, but at the very least requires more time/space than is here.
^ A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. - John 13:34-35
Just on HN I have seen _so many_ claims of "I could rewrite Twitter in a weekend, what were the 5,000 engineers doing, laying off 75% of the employees was the obvious choice." Apparently, that's not so obvious, huh.
I mean you don't have to write it, most of these are just defederated Mastodons with the serial numbers filed off. The problem is that once you've got your private Twitter, it's still expensive and tedious to run for very little benefit other than stoking your own ego.
> I mean you don't have to write it, most of these are just defederated Mastodons ... still expensive and tedious
Exactly this. Mastodon depends on relatively small instances federated together to scale, if you tried to run every current Mastodon user on a single instance it would fall over regardless of how much compute you throw at it. As the network grows it becomes exponentially harder to make it all work.
Also, while Mastodon is fine for early adopter use, it's much slower than Twitter and relatively unreliable.
The federation adds its own kind of complexities, and makes everything less reliable, as well as having a different UX.
Mastodon and Federation are intricately linked in terms of design, technology, UX, community, philosophy, and more. I don't think you could build a good centralised Twitter alternative out of it.
If I remember correctly, Parler did quite well (was the most downloaded app on the Play store, etc) before it was booted by the cloud service provider. It could not recover after that, and I don't know which social network would. So its demise is not because of the wrong audience or unviability.
