'The introduction of “Promoted Tweets” and the growing crackdown of how its API can be used by third-parties are indications how Twitter operates is changing. People may not like these changes but they’re unlikely to leave Twitter because there’s nowhere else to go.'

Hopefully history will beg to differ. And of mention:

http://rstat.us

http://identi.ca

Both are 100% federated and open source. They can even talk to each other through the common OStatus protocol.

So to what do you attribute the notion that neither one has any kind of momentum?

Ummmm... chicken butt? No but srsly, Geeks, especially the OSS ones are horrible marketers.

Well, there's that. And there's also the fact that Twitter has network effects.

It's hard for people with lots of followers to leave, because all their followers are on Twitter.

Some thoughts on employing Twitter headlessly: http://pandawhale.com/convo/7179/how-and-why-im-circumventing-twitters-api-instead-of-using-it