An EU flag; the stars have been replaced with a ring of Threads logos, tinted yellow. In the center floats the disembodied head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. It has been modified: a black bar scrawled with grawlix covers the mouth.

This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads.

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 (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn’t matter, because 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 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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