Presumably it is going to be easier for increasingly smaller and smaller teams to make highly polished, scalable and stable products that will be appealing and addictive and resonate more with their users than whatever Meta can come up with. I suspect that there will be many, many more viable shots taken at Meta’s incumbent positions than have been taken historically because development costs associated with doing so will simply be so much lower. Meta used to need thousands of talented and expensive software engineers. They are saying they don’t anymore. Well, that means their competitors don’t either, which lowers the bar for competition.

I get that it wasn’t just the vast army of talented engineers they kept on staff that formed a moat. But it certainly helped, otherwise they wouldn’t have paid so much to have them on staff.

Point taken though, Meta has a lot more going for it than a simple technological advantage.

I fear we are about to see refreshed patent trolling conflicts regarding software designs, as it's all in the IP these days, which is the "moat" you are looking for.