I disagree. There are whatsapp groups of hundreds of members, some used for political action. If they indeed lose messages, people notice. I'm not sure why you

I disagree. There are whatsapp groups of hundreds of members, some used for political action. If they indeed lose messages, people notice. I'm not sure why you bring up plaintext (it is irrelevant, regardless of Twitter still being plaintext itself). Engineering wise, the user-visible side of Twitter is more or less as complex as the user visible side of whatsapp. Both can be done on very modest hardware with modest operations if they are properly done. Whatsapp was lean (and probably still is). Twitter never was.