I’m not sure you fully understand the overall concept behind the Fediverse. Fragmentation is literally part of the overall design. That is, the concept being a diverse set of apps across distributed instances. They are all united by a single baseline protocol. It isn’t all that different from email.

You sort of contradicted your second point with your third. If all the users just congregate in one place, it doesn’t really matter whether other developers agree with the decisions being made by the big guys. It’s either adopt the standards that the big guys implement or lose feature parity - features that users come to expect at a certain point.

That’s already happening to some extent, but there’s also a strong element of collaborative design. I don’t think that collaboration would exist if the mega corporations get involved. What the trajectory is at this point, I don’t know. To what extent will the giant corporations exert control over this fledgling ecosystem, and to what extent will their efforts be resisted if they start heading in a bad direction. The important part right now is that users have a choice.

Competition wasn’t necessarily the right word choice on my part based on how you seem to be interpreting it. It’s not so much trying to one-up another project as it is to create diversity of ideas in the ecosystem. Instead of everything being controlled by one group of developers, there are hundreds of developers across dozens of projects, all creating something based on their own vision. That diversity can give rise to new ideas much more rapidly than the alternative.