Ex-President Trump’s long-awaited, much-heralded (in some circles) social media app Truth Social has debuted. And it is, in short, a large glitch fest.
The new social network, which essentially looks like an off-brand version of Twitter, was supposed to launch on Monday, available for download in the Apple Store. Now the Trump Media & Technology Group’s CEO (and former U.S. representative from California) Devin Nunes is suggesting it could be another month before the website is ready for primetime.
Among the issues that plagued the site since its launch day (per multiple news reports): the website experienced a 13-hour outage on its first day; there’s a 300,000 person-plus waiting list for getting accepted to use the app; the logo is reportedly stolen/identical to one a British company that sells solar panels for trucks uses; the website has already been criticized for the speech restrictions laid out in its terms of use (which, who reads that, but apparently you are restricted from doing stuff like posting Cuss Words or criticizing the website itself in your social posts). Among those who were actually successful in downloading the app, a bunch of users reported glitches when entering basic information like date of birth or email addresses. The website’s own name is misspelled on at least one section of a Help page.
Overall, the platform was basically non-functional and out of service for most of its launch day, according to the Washington Post, with its developers arguing that “overwhelming demand” was the culprit. Sure.
It’s a large mess. Nunes vowed to Fox News on Sunday that the website would be good to go by the end of March, more than a month after its planned launch date. The former congressman also apparently justified the glitchy holdups by saying that developers were building the site from “scratch,” which, as the Post notes, is not true:
But far from being built from scratch, the site’s code shows it is based heavily on the open-source software Mastodon, which provides free, prebuilt social-networking sites that users can then edit and customize.
Officials for the ripped off Twitter site — posts are called “truths” instead of tweets and “retruths” instead of retweets — have largely billed the new social network as a free-speech paradise, unlike boogeyman mainstream sites like Twitter and Facebook that supposedly silence conservatives and have either permanently or temporarily banned the former president for … literally using the platforms to incite a violent attack on the Capitol.
But that’s laughable. Within hours of the website’s launch a web developer named Matt Ortega tweeted that his attempt at creating an account, that would’ve brought the famed Nunes Cow discourse onto the new site, was banned.
If you recall, much of Nunes’ trajectory away from Congress and into the arms of the Trump social media movement could be attributed to a parody Twitter account that was named after a fake cow.
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