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That would be nice but who would pay for servers? I would love an "Open Twitter" built on standard protocols and implementable by anyone, however if SMTP and NNTP are any indication, most people prefer convenient silos over open solutions. And the reality of a hostile internet mean that there is a need for active resources devoted to protecting any service from abuse.
I've been thinking about how something like this could be done in a completely distributed way, I think I've even seen some research implementation of it. In any case, it'd be interesting...

Hmm... http://twister.net.co/ maybe? The biggest issue is going to be mobile, but if you have enough people firing it up on servers and stuff, you'd probably be okay. And then of course you realize that there's also the even bigger issue of actually getting people to use it. You're fucked there unless you have some serious marketing talent, which most people capable of writing such a thing in the first place lack.

> most people prefer convenient silos over open solutions.

Most people don't care one way or the other. They just want it to do what they want/need.

And they also want their friends to be on the service. That's what's really important, and why a lot of open solutions didn't take off. No one they cared about was using them.
Isn't the problem with NNTP that people are being pushed away from it rather than not wanting to use it?
Something like wikipedia would be nice.
Why?

The only thing twitter does better than basically anything is:

Has a giant userbase containing many influential Internet celebrities.

Except for that it is inferior in almost every single way, starting with the ridiculously low character limit, continuing with the spam everyone all the time etc the list goes on.

Hey, even google+ is better in several ways, except for the part about Internet celebrities.

That ridiculously low character limit is one of the reasons I'm active on Twitter much more than anywhere else, as it forces people to be concise. And for everything else, like complex thoughts that can't be expressed as tweets, there are always blogs, whose URLs you can also distribute via Twitter. Twitter basically works like your personal aggregator of interesting stuff. And I freaking hate people using Facebook or Google+ for blogging, because these services suck for blogging.

On spam, I don't know what you're talking about, because I get no spam. I'm @alexelcu on Twitter, my account is from 2008 and I'm counting about 20 blocked accounts corresponding to about 20 spams I got in 8 years, which is actually rather impressive.

I think people complaining about the char limit don't understand the value of Twitter.

And no, Google+ seriously sucks, I could rant all day about how much Google+ sucks. And you know what? Google+ wouldn't need Internet celebrities if it would be compatible with the open Internet, but it isn't ;-)

Counterpoint on the spam thing: I get a noticeable amount -- one a day or so -- of spam followers. That is, accounts that follow me entirely so I'll see their name in the notification email, and then unfollow me within a day.

It's an interesting form of spam, which isn't trackable by observing Twitter message traffic as it lives entirely in account metadata.

Eh by spam-everyone-all-the-time I mean that any message I post will be "spammed" out to all my followers even if they just follow me for my Java interest or because I sometimes tweet about local politics.
But this is one of the things I like about twitter :) Well, most of the time. Sometimes you find out your heroes are terrible people.

When it works you find out things you didn't know you were interested in - getting out of the 'filter bubble'.

Not with these guys in charge I hope :

“I believe we need to build a platform that respects and amplifies every voice in a way that the world needs to hear it. I trust that the world will amplify and retweet and have conversations where appropriate.” [1]

Which means "Kill the cops" is ok but "#StopEnslavingSaudiWomen" gets your account banned. [2]

[1] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/06/02/jack-dorsey-blms-de...

[2] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/21/twitter-suspends-wo...

You are not wrong, but linking to Breitbart probably damages your credibility.
When most media is paying Clinton [1] calling doubts on credibility is laughable tbh. especially in an age where if one is piqued one can right click ... search and go look at places you trust.

[1] http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/clinton-foundati...

I agree with your disapproval of twitter's leadership, and recognize the factual basis for it. I am only suggesting that some of your audience might be biased against you and your comments depending on who you cite - even when the facts are simple and easily confirmed. It's not rational, but its common. For example, I might (unfortunately) unconsciously question the intelligence of someone who linked to buzzfeed, even if buzzfeed accurately reported relevant facts in that instance.
It is a public utility.
it's a "private" utility. But I take your point.

If they remove all the fat making a tweet page 5mb it could be hosted for nearly nothing by some FOSS org.

Except for all the backend connecting each user's messages to their followers. That's no mean feat. And certainly would cost more than "nearly nothing".
Yes, Twitter's backend is actually quite sophisticated.

It's one thing to build a very small Twitter clone for you and your friends, it's quite another to scale that up to hundreds of millions of users and keep everything running smoothly.

But that's exactly what is what as the beginning. Twitter spent a significant amount of its early days sitting on the Fail Whale screen. Sure, now it's stable, when you throw a complete rewrite, and millions of dollars at it.