I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?
In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.
Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple.
No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the world, and groups and chat, ... and all of it in a way that people think it is instant.
Thats a problem with Signal. It is really really sluggish compared to whatsapp or telegram.
Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later.
Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.
That's why it's going to win. You don't need every platform to implement every interesting feature, the open nature of the data allows the innovation to happen much more effortlessly.
People won't install another social media app if there isn't sufficient incoming social credit encouraging them to use it and the need falls into an existing category. Something sufficiently different can gain an “I couldn't have done this with” credit to overcome some stickiness with.
… maybe. Sort of. I think.
(I wonder what this means for e.g. Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, if it's true.)
But Facebook did beat MySpace. That’s what network effects are
Why bother with the suffocation then.
Acquiring WhatsApp was not cheap and required significant effort. Why bother.
Than answer to your question is no, IMO. Network effects may discourage competition from people with defeatist attitudes (who would give up before even trying), but network effects are not exclusive to Facebook. They can happen elsewhere.
One theory why Apple is letting iPhone users stop Facebook from tracking them is that Apple believes that iMessage is or will be competing with WhatsApp. It aligns with the theory that Facebook's move to change the WhatsApp ToS at this time is because usage of so-called "E2E" messaging apps is growing significantly.