No a de-emphasis on developing open protocols and emphasis on developing closed services is what damaged it. Usenet, IRC, HTTP, SMTP/POP3/IMAP were all protocols that anyone could implement and provide services for. And they all (for the most part) interoperated with each other despite being run by corporations.

Twitter decided that it wanted to provide a service and then actively discouraged people who attempted to interoperate with their service in ways that weren't approved by Twitter. These are technical and business decisions that can absolutely be laid at the feet of Jack Dorsey, yet in typical leftist fashion he wants to blame "corporations". No Jack, you were the one responsible for those decisions.

You could have chosen to publish an open specification for micro-blogging platforms and simply been a service provider (perhaps even the primary one) implementing that protocol. You didn't. Perhaps you had good reasons for not doing that, but that was a conscious decision you made as Chief Executive. Own it.