Saw a post somewhere that alluded to a company doing what I would call the Microsoft Way™ (and other companies) type of thing where they Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on some burgeoning competitor or space they want to get into.

Embrace: the open standards, maybe offering mastodon hosting for a small fee using twitter cloud services, offer experts to help move the standards forward.

Extend them selfishly optimizing your own thing like maybe a federated twitter/mastodon platform that bridges between the two, providing messaging across, ad-network sharing, etc. Keep adding to the ActivityPub standards with things people want and hosting becomes easier to choose Twitter hosted Mastodon.

Extinguish: after some time spent accumulating users, stabilizing adverts, establishing an ad-network, moving standards forward, etc. start charging more for mastodon hosting or allow users to migrate easily to twitter and shut the federated system down.