Example: Meta federates with lemmy. Lemmy is small so it gets more feature requests than it can code up. Meta comes in and looks at the most requested feature that’s been put on lemmy’s backlog. Let’s say it’s some mod tool. Maybe even AI mod tool that sorts comments based on sentiment analysis. And they only implement that feature for Meta clients - not for lemmy. Suddenly mods have a choice - use lemmy and face flood of trolls in their communities or move to Meta and be able to properly moderate those troll waves. Some will stay, some will move. Another new cool feature for Meta, some will stay, some will move. Eventually most users will be on Meta client because it has all these useful features. OP’s article describes the rest.