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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

How did they get pre-seed funding for this? Unless I'm missing something, any angel who would invest $1M into a company that is building an alternative, ad-free Instagram client has to be one of the dumbest people around, no?

How could anyone even conceivably think this could go on indefinitely?

I'm asking genuinely because I don't get how anyone could've thought this would end any way other than by Meta putting the kibosh on this.

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It can be that they're actively looking for this to happen to set a legal precedent legalizing this.

It's not a bad argument - if you are allowed to view content in an official client, it must mean that you are licensed to view said content and that a third-party client which displays the same content should be allowed to do so since you've already got a license for it.

Adversarial interoperability is our only escape of big-tech monopolies.

Several YC companies are doing the same in later stage of funding such as beeple. They reverse engineer and bridge multiple platforms.

Reverse engineering is not illegal and if there is genuine demand for an alternative client, why would investors not fund it?

Eventually, you will become big enough to be next plaid and force everyone to open their APIs.

They could be non-technical people with no experience in software, they could have been misled by the company, or maybe they really thought they could get away with it somehow?

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