Meta-ecosystems are powerful forces.

There are ecosystems (a single platform) and meta-ecosystems (multiple platforms that are all affiliated and act, in some ways, like one).

The difference between them is how many different entities are making coherent decisions about what behavior to ship.

There are two dimensions: the specification of behavior and the implementation.

Proprietary platforms are almost always shipped by one entity, and the "specification" is simply the behavior.

Even open platforms that have only one implementation mostly act like one platform, because although people could tweak the implementation they ship, it's not worth the effort and everyone generally ships the single implementation.

The web platform is an open specification and a handful of open implementations, a meta ecosystem.

Email is also a meta-ecosystem; lots of different implementations, and also a kind of fuzzy set of standards.

An open system's canonical standards are not some crisp, clear single entity; it's a fuzzy superposition.

At the core, the subset of things that most people agree are part of the specification.

The fuzzy edges are the parts that only a subset of people believe is canonical.

You could say the specification is centralized if observers expect or believe that the spec is basically one (possibly fuzzy) thing, as opposed to multiple things.

Ecosystems have power that scales with the square of the number of participants.

So two ecosystems that have the same notional specification, join together into a meta ecosystem, and get significantly more powerful than either entity could do alone.

They are joined together into one ecosystem by an elastic band.

The elastic band is the expectation and belief that they represent one, fuzzy, thing.

If it were an iron band, and they had to move forward in lockstep, then the slowest implementation could slow the whole ecosystem down for everyone.

As an elastic band, different implementations can go in different directions they think are good, initially stretching the band and sticking their necks out.

But if other implementers and users agree it's a good direction, they'll also go in that direction, putting increasing pressure on the laggards.

If any entity pulls too far in any direction, the band breaks and they are no longer part of the meta-ecosystem, a discontinuous loss of ecosystem energy for them.

Because of that discontinuous loss of energy, most entities will avoid doing that.

Only if an entity represents the vast majority of the ecosystem individually might going it alone work, but it would be an aggressive and bad-faith act.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish"

In this way the fuzzy ecosystem is constantly evolving, and moving in a coherent, consensus direction with a collective, ongoing vote on legitimacy of a roiling chaos of micro-decisions.

It's meta-stable.

When do things pull into these meta-ecosystems vs stay separate as proprietary ecosystems?

The first thing that is necessary is that a critical mass of participants think of them as a thing with a (perhaps fuzzy) spec.

That's possible if enough ethos aligns... but also critically if the holders of the IP also are OK with joining.

You can't have an adverserially-meta ecosystem emerge out of a proprietary platform unless the IP holder releases their rights or never had them in the first place.

But once you have that, it can emerge if things are mostly coherent and the same.

This can only happen if things are similar enough, and also changing slowly enough to mostly cohere.

This is only really possible in late stage ecosystems where a stable, viable thing has already sublimated out of the chaos.

If you try to do this at too high of a pace layer, the overall meta distillation cannot cohere because the individual components have too much chaotic energy.

Once a meta ecosystem coheres out of the chaos, it tends to get stronger and stronger (and slower and slower) and the longer the precedent for it existing, the less likely it is to decohere in the future.