No, it never worked. The examples are web browsers, email and java, all of which remain open standards. There’s a reason Google doesn’t try this shit even though they own a large portion of the email and browser market, because they know it’ll just piss people off and bring them in front of a judge for anti-competitive behavior and ultimately do nothing.
There’s a general, well founded, distrust of meta. Theres a general theory going around that they will embrace, extend and extinguish the fediverse. It will ride the wave of federation then when it gets large enough it will defederate or add some dumb feature that will break all compatibility. The problem with this strategy is it will bring them in front of a court for anti-conpetitive behavior, just like what happened to Microsoft every time it tried to do this, and possibly break up the whole company as instagram might get shaved off too. There’s a reason Google doesn’t try to do this with chrome or gmail, they learned it’s a bad strategy from Microsoft. The reality is the fediverse as it stands right now is a blip to meta, a blip they can point to and say they aren’t a monopoly, but just a blip, not some radical existential threat that needs to be destroyed.
Meta does not want to “consume the fediverse” , it’s not worth it. Threads has been up for a day and it already has 10x the number of active users than mastodon. Mastodon and the fediverse as it currently stands, is a blip compared to instagram and Twitter. They’re doing activitypub so they can claim there’s a free market and avoid any anti-trust litigation for owning the three largest social media platforms. If that means a relatively small number of people stay on mastodon instead of threads that’s a small price to pay.
Except it doesn’t work and no corporation does it any more because it doesn’t. Look at the two main examples, internet browsers and email. Both of them remain open platforms with viable foss alternatives because google knows that doing this sort of stuff will get them in trouble with anti-trust suits.
Maybe not in Lemmy but on mastodon individual users can block domains.
And open them up to anti-conpetitive and monopoly law suits? Meta has already been getting calls to be broken up for having the top two social medias, if they get the full trifecta then they’re gonna have a tough time selling defederation to the FTC or E.U. Better for them to take 90% of the pie and allow others to fight over the scraps then try for full 100% and risk litigation.
To prevent anti-trust suits. There’s a reason meta never bought Twitter even though it could many times over, they’d be brought to court for having the top three social media platforms. If they were going to enter this space they needed something to point to and say they aren’t a monopoly.