I agree that making a twitter clone is relatively easy. The difficulty is getting mass adoption, and the buy-out provides a route to that.
One way is as a stepping stone: they buy twitter, later see a SAFEtwitter as an alternative, vote to move everyone (and their data) to it.
Another is that creating a mass movement, which ultimately doesn’t get to making a buy-out, they have a large body of users who are motivated to adopt something else, and choose to move en masse over to a SAFEtwitter.
Without a hundred million users, SAFEtwitter will be just another chat app. A good one, but not what twitter is today. It also provides us with another route to mass adoption of SAFE Network. Imagine if we get 10m twitter users joining within a year or something! 