Neither. The analogy was to say that their point was irrelevant. The fact that there is a network with 1.5B users does not prevent of a smaller, pay-to-join, network.
It obviously doesn't, plenty of space for niche players.
But it does prevent them from becoming the next 2B people social network which will default to becoming to go-to social media to connect with just about anyone you meet in the world.
A $1/month app won't replace Instagram (the article is about IG dying).
My sibling comment addressed this point: my bet [0] is that the next big social media network is not going to be a monopolistic walled garden, but it will be instead made by a constellation of federated providers. My belief is not that Instagram is going to be replaced by one niche app where people pay $1/month, but it will die and be replaced by thousands of smaller players who can interoperate:
- Newspapers, TV networks and streaming services who will offer a "free" account to their Mastodon (or similar) server for paying subscribers.
- "Influencers" who will be hosting their own ActivityPub servers
- Companies who will realize that they can put all their marketing communications under their own control and branding.
- Fringe communities who will be running their servers just because they can.
- Commercial providers who will look for something that can differentiate themselves (privacy, custom clients with special features) and charge for it.
- etc, etc, etc.
[0]: By bet, I mean that literally. This has been one of my side-projects and I've put already a non-negligible amount of time and money into it. Thanks to Musk, my service has seen more activity, signups and inquiries about custom hosting in the past 3 weeks than it has seen in the first 3 years.