OG App is the coolest app you never heard of.
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You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).
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This was very successful! Users didn't have to choose between their friends on Myspace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it, too.
This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what "move fast and break things" looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit.
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This was very successful! Users didn't have to choose between their friends on Myspace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it, too.
This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what "move fast and break things" looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit.
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It's what Apple did when they cloned the MS Office file formats and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them:
But like every pirate, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they'd attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress, but if anyone does it to *them*, it would be piracy.
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It's what Apple did when they cloned the MS Office file formats and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them:
But like every pirate, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they'd attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress, but if anyone does it to *them*, it would be piracy.
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What's more, they took advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US Trade Representative spread around the world (with threats of tariffs for noncompliance). Soon, nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file-formats:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
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What's more, they took advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US Trade Representative spread around the world (with threats of tariffs for noncompliance). Soon, nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file-formats:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
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For decades, this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the USA, and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties, that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state.
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For decades, this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the USA, and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties, that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state.
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Obviously, that is *dead* now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker game that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to pretend to play (TM November Kelly):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
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Obviously, that is *dead* now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker game that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to pretend to play (TM November Kelly):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
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EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar:
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en
They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
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EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar:
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en
They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp
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But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate
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But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate
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So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them.
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So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them.
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Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use.
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Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use.
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Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches.
After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non-Meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on Threads, then why wouldn't you leave?
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Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches.
After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non-Meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on Threads, then why wouldn't you leave?
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Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him - they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on Zuckerberg's platforms.
So Threads never *really* joined the Fediverse. You can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high "switching costs" for leaving their services.
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Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him - they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on Zuckerberg's platforms.
So Threads never *really* joined the Fediverse. You can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high "switching costs" for leaving their services.
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They exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of Threads enshittification, with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account:
https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-threads-ads-go-global/
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They exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs
So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of Threads enshittification, with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account:
https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-threads-ads-go-global/
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This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostack. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the EU, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state, and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
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This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostack. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the EU, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state, and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
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People *hate* ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
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People *hate* ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
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As a result, tech companies - especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity - love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace).
Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
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As a result, tech companies - especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity - love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace).
Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
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Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies:
Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support *right now* - not in five years when the new data centers come online.
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Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies:
Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support *right now* - not in five years when the new data centers come online.
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It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers - an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives.
What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience - it could bootstrap European social media services.
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It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers - an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives.
What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience - it could bootstrap European social media services.
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Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts.
Europe - like everywhere else - is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national, independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy-respecting alternative.
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Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts.
Europe - like everywhere else - is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national, independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy-respecting alternative.
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They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with Myspace: users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient.
To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs - you have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if those friends are still stuck on the old network.
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They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with Myspace: users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient.
To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs - you have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if those friends are still stuck on the old network.
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Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do "on-device bridging" - where a new social media app is able to break open the data storage of the Threads app on the same device and move that data into its own feeds. And because the EU has the GDPR, they have the privacy framework needed to police the privacy violations that breaking into other apps' data storage can lead to.
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Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@fucinafibonacci @spettacoli capolavoro assoluto. Commovente, anche
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@nullstreamer ty!
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@shinmera wow
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@aeva 🎉
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@EricAlper most definitely Pink Floyd's The Wall. I had it on musicassette and I had an autoreverse cassette player. I listened to it on repeat for so long that the motor started making that grating noise that only overused motors do (but I had earphones, so the only people annoyed by the motor noise were THE REST OF MY FAMILY)
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@aeva woohoo
