While Twitter's turmoil has sparked waves of interest in alternative social networks, tech's biggest firms have stayed conspicuously aloof from the field.

Between the lines: Cloning Twitter would not be a huge technical challenge for companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta that already have their own massive cloud infrastructur.

Yes, but: For these companies, a Twitter-like service would bring big political, social and legal headaches with little promise of a financial payoff.

Sources at Meta, Google and Microsoft suggest that they have no appetite for building a Twitter alternative.

• Google is largely taking a "been there, done that" view, having built, invested in and ultimately shuttered Google+ (and, before that, Buzz, Wave and Orkut). Its social media focus these days is on YouTube, where the major thrust right now is expanding YouTube Shorts, its rival to TikTok.
• Microsoft actually comes the closest to having an alternative to Twitter, at least for certain types of conversations, since it owns LinkedIn. But LinkedIn's business focus has allowed the service to operate with way fewer thorny moderation challenges than Twitter has faced, and it's hard to imagine Microsoft seeing any upside in taking on Twitter-scale problems.
• Meta, of these companies, has the largest content moderation system in place, as well as the largest social graph (data on how users are interconnected). But the company is currently in cutting mode amid recent layoffs, even in its core services, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is concentrating on building a metaverse — rebuilding Twitter would simply be a distraction.

Be smart: Twitter is very small as a business compared to any of these companies.

• Twitter's annual revenue last year was on the order of $5 billion. That's a small fraction of Meta's $118 billion, Microsoft's $200 billion and Google parent Alphabet's $250 billion.

Yes, but: Plenty of companies, including Meta, Snap and even smaller players like Nextdoor, would like to pick off any ad dollars that leave Twitter, especially as the overall market contracts.

• "We are absolutely looking at any and all freeing up of budgets," Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar said earlier this month on a conference call with reporters.

In the void left by the giants, a bunch of upstarts are vying for Twitter's user base, including the open-source Mastodon and Hive, along with several right-leaning sites such as Gab, Parler and Donald Trump's Truth Social.

• A new entrant is Post News, created by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin. The site, which has launched in beta for select users, has over 125,000 people on its waitlist, according to an email Bardin sent to beta users.

Our thought bubble: Most of these would-be competitors are likely to have a very rough time achieving anywhere near Twitter's scale. Even if they do, none of them — with the exception of the non-profit Mastodon — can promise users they won't get bought by a billionaire and turned upside down, just as happened to Twitter.

Here's the latest from the chaotic world of Elon Musk's Twitter:

Late Monday, Musk tweeted that he was postponing the reopening of his revamped $8-a-month Twitter Blue subscription service again.

• The plan, which gives every subscriber a blue "verified" check mark, launched two weeks ago, but the wave of impersonation and fraud that followed forced a quick shutdown.
• Musk originally announced the plan would reopen Nov. 29. Now, he says he's "holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation."

Musk told Twitter's staff, now down to roughly 2,700 employees, that he was finished with layoffs and looking to hire "people who are great at writing software," per The Verge.

• But the announcement came on the same day that a new wave of layoffs hit the already reeling Twitter advertising sales team, per Bloomberg.

The personal Twitter account for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was reinstated Monday, more than 10 months after the service permanently suspended her for "repeated violations" of the platform's COVID misinformation policy.

• Greene's return comes amid a broader move by Musk to restore previously suspended or banned accounts of high-profile users, from former President Donald Trump to Ye (formerly known as Kanye West).

Developers of some of the world's most popular video games are expanding the tools players use to create characters — downplaying gendered terms and untethering options for body types, voice and other characteristics from gender selection, Axios' Stephen Totilo reports.

Why it matters: The shift is part of a trend among game makers to be more inclusive of a wider set of players by letting them see themselves in the games they play.

• Such changes are making these games more welcoming to trans and nonbinary players and those who want to have such characters.
• They also allow more deviation from gender stereotypes for all players.

Details: A pre-release update for next week's World of Warcraft Dragonflight, which expands the Activision Blizzard massively multiplayer online game that launched in 2004, renames "male" and "female" terms in its character creator to "body type 1" and "body type 2."

• Earlier this year, EA's The Sims 4, which plays out like a virtual dollhouse, began to let players customize pronouns — "she/her," "he/him," "they/them" — for the Sims characters they create.
• SquareEnix's Harvestella, a recently released game that mixes farming with sword-fighting, gives players three options for their character's gender: male, female or nonbinary.

The upcoming "Harry Potter" game Hogwarts Legacy is in the spotlight for its association, however distanced, with "Potter" author J.K. Rowling, who has repeatedly made transphobic comments.

• The game's character customization tools are open-ended enough to allow players to create trans wizards or witches.
• Its character creator, shown publicly earlier this month, lets players choose body types and voices independently of each other — then lets them select, without restriction, whether their character dorms with "wizards" or "witches."

What they’re saying: "It's undeniable that there has been a recent inflection point in the way developers approach character creators, particularly in games with higher fidelity graphics and character models," Blair Durkee, the associate director of gaming at GLAAD, tells Axios.

• She attributes this to "the growing recognition of gender diversity in society, led by younger generations" and cited a 2022 Gallup poll that found that one-fifth of Gen Z Americans identify as LGBT.
• "A game that requires players to choose between rigidly binary gender options [man or woman] simply no longer reflects the world that we live in," Durkee said.

The big picture: Video game character creators are often considered the measuring tool for how inclusive a game is.

• For decades, some games have let players choose at least some basic options, often coded as male or female, with limited choices for body size, skin color or hairstyle.
• Customizable hairstyles have historically lacked options for Black characters, prompting one Twitter user to track whether new game releases do.

On Tap

• Computer and printer maker HP Inc. reports earnings after the bell.

Trading Places

• Formstack has hired Stephen Atuna as senior VP of sales, and Elle Woulfe as senior VP of global marketing. 

ICYMI

• Shares of Zoom fell after the company issued a financial outlook for the current fiscal year that was below expectations. (CNBC)

First-year Brown university student Olivia Pichardo has made history by being the first woman named to an NCAA Division I varsity baseball team.