Archived version: https://archive.li/Yg8r8
My favorite part:
But while his reaction the day after learning that X was commandeering his handle was extreme frustration, Vaught told Ars that the platform will remain his primary form of social media.
"it's highly annoying, but Twitter is still my preferred social media," Vaught said. "That's how I communicate and learn my news about what's going on. Nothing else compares."
His only "minor protest" to X's action, he said, was to cancel his Twitter Blue subscription.
Vaught is mostly a Musk fan, as he's interested in Musk's electric cars and space developments. He said that this experience with X hasn't tainted his opinion of Musk or his relationship too much with X as a platform. He's holding out hope that Musk has a long-term plan for where Musk is taking X, but like many users, he's struggling to adjust to the rebranding.
I don't know if that's as big a problem as you think. Assuming they have not previously allowed special characters at the beginning of Twitter handles (I don't know whether they had the foresight to do this), they could use a character that was disallowed previously and is a legal character in URLs and then include that special character in the URL path so that it would be twitter.com/~user/ or whatever. This would only be applicable to new official accounts and would not break URLs for existing users.
Good point actually.