There’s nothing unique to the current Fediverse situation. In the days of old people had their own web pages and web servers too, and we had protocols to announce changes to people too (hello? RSS? X-Headers?), we linked to each other as well (directories, webrings) and we had chat (IRC). Yet we still landed on CorpoNet.
In fact I’d surmise the current situation is worse. Whereas with the old ad tried protocols you could actually host a web server with content on a potato, or on an old beeper, nu-protocols tend to be quite resource hungry. I oft hear that people have to pay two bills for Mastodon: one for the web service and another one for the amont of storage and traffic that it generates; from what I hear Matrix is similarly heavy compared to, say, IRC or XMPP. Dunno if it’s still true or not but I also recall that stuff like Lemmy depends on DNS, meaning you have to be able to buy your own domain and depend on that kind of central authority (wasn’t the point of Fediverse stuff to be decentralized?). Rather recently a good amount of Lemmy servers were oopsied because one of the .tld authorities pulled the rug from under an entire top-level domain name.