For reddit and twitter it's also induced by the threat of AI. Twitter and reddit host a lot of content, organized, sorted, coherent. It's invaluable for training an AI and these companies don't want to let it go for free. They want control over it, therefore they are making it very hard for AI companies to farm their content. The fact that it's happening now is because AI companies are probably rushing to copy as much data as possible before laws are voted to put a limit over them.
It will be the same for the fediverse, our content will be scanned by AI's. Our content is freely visible, organized, sorted and scored. We should be careful about that. If you are not a professional publisher or a public person then you should probably think about rotating your username as often as possible.
edit: But also, with the rise of tiktok, a lot of countries are now suspicious about the soft power of those apps, and are ready to legislate against them. The EU already did, they did vote fines against them and are regularly getting money out of them. The taboo is gone, you can attack those companies, it works. They were supposed to be out of reach, but they are not.
Also there is no genius in Twitter, as far as I know they have no patent over anything. If someone manages to become more popular than them on the same principle then twitter is done. Gravity will do the rest and users will move to a different platform. People are using it because people are using it. So the model is fragile and the value is questionable.
philip_the3rd
Pandantic