My sibling comment addressed this point: my bet [0] is that the next big social media network is not going to be a monopolistic walled garden, but it will be instead made by a constellation of federated providers. My belief is not that Instagram is going to be replaced by one niche app where people pay $1/month, but it will die and be replaced by thousands of smaller players who can interoperate:

- Newspapers, TV networks and streaming services who will offer a "free" account to their Mastodon (or similar) server for paying subscribers.

- "Influencers" who will be hosting their own ActivityPub servers

- Companies who will realize that they can put all their marketing communications under their own control and branding.

- Fringe communities who will be running their servers just because they can.

- Commercial providers who will look for something that can differentiate themselves (privacy, custom clients with special features) and charge for it.

- etc, etc, etc.

[0]: By bet, I mean that literally. This has been one of my side-projects and I've put already a non-negligible amount of time and money into it. Thanks to Musk, my service has seen more activity, signups and inquiries about custom hosting in the past 3 weeks than it has seen in the first 3 years.