Threads’ Margin Is the Eurostack’s Opportunity  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **OG App's Meteoric Rise And Rapid Takedown** - Cory Doctorow describes OG App's quick rise by restoring Instagram's original experience and blocking tracking. - Meta issued a takedown and the app was removed from app stores within a day. Transcript: Cory Doctorow OG app is the coolest app you've never heard of. Back in 2022, two teenagers unilaterally dis-and Instagram by making an alt client that restored all the parts of Insta that made it a success and blocked all the anti-features that Meta crammed down users' throats after they had them locked in. Here's how OG app worked. First, it popped up a browser window and loaded the Instagram login screen. Then after you'd logged into Insta, it stole the session key. That's the cryptographic proof that you were logged into your account. That let it impersonate you to Insta's servers and slurp down the whole feed that Insta had queued up for you. After grabbing your feed, OG app deleted all of the ads, all the slop, all the boosted content, all the months-old clickbait that the algorithm TM had surfaced. What was left was pristine, the posts from the people you followed in reverse chronological order. To make this all even sweeter, OG apps sent no data back to Meta as you used it except for the likes and comments you intended to transmit to the company. All the other data that Meta's apps gather got blocked. Everything from your location to which posts you slowed down, your scrolling on, to accelerometer readouts that revealed minute changes in how you hold your phone from second to second. Boy, did people like this. By the end of the day, OG App was in the top 10 charts for both Google and Apple's app stores. By the next morning, it was gone. ([Time 0:05:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/16a3a103-2ef2-406d-b391-1a3afb65830a)) - **From Pirate To Admiral: The Double Standard** - Tech companies clone rivals to escape lock-in then criminalize others who clone them once they dominate. - IP laws and trade pressure turned interoperability fixes into literal crimes worldwide. Transcript: Cory Doctorow The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on MySpace, and all of Facebook's improvements On MySpace, like Zuck making a promise never to spy on his users, didn't matter, MySpace had something Facebook could not match. MySpace had all your friends. Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem. They offered MySpace users a bot. You gave the 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. 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. Looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit. It's what Apple did when they cloned the Microsoft 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 all pirates, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress. But if anyone does it to them, well, that would be piracy. What's more, they were able to take advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the U.S. Trade representatives spread around the world with threats of tariffs for noncompliance. ([Time 0:07:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/603e0c84-6de6-4e53-80ba-b863b50901e3)) - **Geopolitics Open A Path For Eurostack** - Trump's actions loosened the global political constraints that protected US tech firms from scrutiny. - Europe now has political momentum to pursue digital sovereignty and build the Eurostack. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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 play. Trademark November Kelly. 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. They're building the Eurostack, a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giant's offerings. But Eurostack is about to run into a wall. ([Time 0:10:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/abed6760-14e9-46e1-92b9-059086234901)) - **Threads Avoided Full Federation** - Threads adopted ActivityPub foundations but didn't fully federate with Mastodon, keeping users locked. - Meta intentionally designs high switching costs to prevent user migration to independent servers. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on ActivityPub and Mastodon, these being free, open, 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. 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? 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 join the Fediverse. ([Time 0:11:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0dac37b3-32cb-4c01-ae5f-96d781c7c8fe)) - **Ad Blocking Hits Legal Barriers On Mobile** - Meta's ad practices violate GDPR but avoid enforcement by routing complaints through Ireland. - App-level ad-blocking is rare because reverse-engineering apps is often illegal under laws like Article 6. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. But people hate ads. More than half of all web users have installed an ad blocker, which also protects their privacy. It is the largest consumer boycott in human history. But no one has ever installed an ad blocker for an app, because reverse engineering apps and mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. ([Time 0:13:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/368ef65b-ba17-410a-9746-4b2f71d981a4)) - **Legalize Jailbreaking To Enable Alternatives** - Repeal Article 6 to legalize privacy-enhancing reverse engineering and alt-clients in the EU. - Use the Digital Fairness Act to create exemptions that let Europeans block tracking and build alternatives. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Meta's new ad strategy for threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. Procedurally, this is a great moment for it as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD6 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. ([Time 0:14:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ee9ad20-e2c4-4fd2-8e5d-d6b3cdb82bd1)) - **Win Support With Immediate, Tangible Reforms** - Push for legal changes that give immediate, tangible benefits to Europeans rather than distant infrastructure projects. - Use Threads' ad-shittification as a rallying issue to gain public support for digital sovereignty reforms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. 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. That's an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on Europeans' daily lives. ([Time 0:14:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8b237572-e06b-4dec-82f6-d561ce0846e6)) - **Use On-Device Bridging To Reduce Switching Costs** - Enable on-device bridging so new social apps can import Threads/Instagram follows and lower switching costs. - Leverage GDPR to ensure privacy-safe bridging while bootstrapping European social platforms. Transcript: Cory Doctorow 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. 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 their friends are stuck on the old network. Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do on-device bridging. That's 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. ([Time 0:15:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecbb37bf-2b93-497d-91d0-261eb40a049e)) - **Ad Blocking Is Consumer Bargaining** - Ad blocking functions as consumer bargaining, not theft; it pressures platforms to offer fairer terms. - Without ad blocking, platforms extract vast private data and provide minimal service in return. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Meta will squawk. They'll say Europe is legalizing the violation of its corporate rights. But Meta violates Europeans' rights at scale. And the rights I'm talking about taking away from Meta are rights EU gave it in the first place, in exchange for a broken promise of tariff-free access to the USA. Ad blocking isn't stealing. Ad blocking is bargaining. Without ad blocking, the companies don't sell us service in exchange for our privacy. They plunder all the private data they can get and dribble out services at whatever level they think we deserve. ([Time 0:16:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b928298-ec97-49d6-9e30-18c7698dcdca))