I like the idea of transparency that explains the moderation rules of privately owned platforms*. However, regulating them as a town square makes no legal sense. Truth Social clearly demonstrates that alternatives can be built and that users are interested. It also clearly demonstrates that its failure was from awful execution of their product and services. Regardless of your opinion of Truth Social, from a technical point-of-view it was poorly built and its features poorly implemented. Lawmakers would have a better argument if Truth Social was a well designed product with interested users that could not join because they were tightly tied to other platforms. The market has yet to show that alternatives are impossible and therefore town square comparisons have no weight.

If you want an alternative platform build one that can compete. There's nothing stopping you other than skill and business acumen.

* This has its own issues if the site's moderation includes machine learning. That's unrelated to the Texas law, though.

When Yahoo and Google started giving click-thru data for advertising, as opposed to page impressions, advertisers were shocked that viewers ignored most of their ads. When Tivo starting giving viewing statistics to the networks they were shocked at how ineffective their ads were. Are newspapers only now learning that there's a huge difference between seeing a headline (an ad) and actually paying attention to it? Seriously?