Heh, well, a single tweet (280 char max) would take 486 seconds 8 minutes. Assuming you wanted just to send it a single hop in the USA. If you wanted three hops it would take 24 minutes and during that time significant chunks of the USA could not send tweets for 8 minutes at a time.
Imagine:
1:00pm SF transmits east of the sierras for 8 minutes.
1:08pm Someone east of the sierras transmits to someone east of the rockies
1:16pm Someone east of rockies transmits to someone on the coast
1:24pm Someone on the east cost receives a tweet
Keep in mind that from 1:00 to 1:16pm that nobody west of the rockies could tweet on the same frequency. So the effective tweets/hour would be something like a few per hour per frequency.
And it's not just latency that is added, if the demand exceeds the bandwidth available you'd never catch up.
Or to think of it another way, the USA over some theoretical mesh over HF couldn't keep up with this thread.
Imagine: 1:00pm SF transmits east of the sierras for 8 minutes. 1:08pm Someone east of the sierras transmits to someone east of the rockies 1:16pm Someone east of rockies transmits to someone on the coast 1:24pm Someone on the east cost receives a tweet
Keep in mind that from 1:00 to 1:16pm that nobody west of the rockies could tweet on the same frequency. So the effective tweets/hour would be something like a few per hour per frequency.
And it's not just latency that is added, if the demand exceeds the bandwidth available you'd never catch up.
Or to think of it another way, the USA over some theoretical mesh over HF couldn't keep up with this thread.