I think a lot of it comes down to the amount of money commercial companies can pour into marketing their products. That said, fediverse is growing pretty steadily and it has a big advantage not being commercial. Companies need to have constant growth to stay afloat, and as soon as they can’t do that then investors start loosing interest. Then the money starts drying up and the whole house of cards can rapidly collapse.

Meanwhile, open source runs largely on volunteers, it just needs a big enough user base to be sustainable. We just need enough people to maintain the projects and enough users to produce content. With millions of people using the fediverse, it’s going to be around indefinitely and it will likely outlive all the existing commercial platforms. Time is on our side.

The other big advantage is that fediverse works on cooperation. Commercial platforms create walled gardens and jealously guard their content. Hence why we see the trend of screenshotting and cross-posting on different platforms. On the other hand, platforms in the fediverse all benefit from more content being available regardless what platform users generate it from. More people starting to use any of the platforms mean that the ecosystem grows as a whole, and that’s a beautiful thing.