It’s easy, right? You could write it in BASIC and run it off the old Apple II in your closet. You just accept a text string from someone calling in, and you post it on a web page, and presto! Fame and money start rolling in.
Even Donald Trump could do it! Or think he could do it, because that man is delusional.
The rollout of Donald Trump’s social network has predictably been a disaster. Truth Social’s debut on Monday was marred by technical problems and a gigantic waiting list, while some people who actually were able to use the service complained of being “censored.”
Truth Social “has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist,” The Washington Post wrote yesterday. Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes said on a Fox News show that Truth Social’s goal is to be “fully operational at least within the United States” by the end of March. The waiting list is now over 500,000.
I wonder how many of those half million are lookie-loos gawking at the train wreck, how many are reporters who figure they just have to report on this desperate ex-politician’s fantasy (they don’t, by the way), and how many are sincere followers of Trump AKA chucklefucks?
Of course he didn’t design this himself.
Truth Social was built using Mastodon open source software.
They just grabbed some existing software, plastered some graphics and revised some of the text messages, and called it good.
I have an account on Mastodon. I didn’t have to wait in line to get it, just found an instance that didn’t have the Donald on it, and started typing. Isn’t the point of Mastodon to have a decentralized distribution of servers, anyway?
Also, it’s a bit ironic to name the failing media site created by a politician known for constantly lying “truth”.
To be fair, using the Mastodon software was the smartest thing they did – it’s a reasonably robust and well-tested codebase.
Compare Parler, who didn’t go for that SJW nonsense and rolled their own, to hilariously disastrous effect.
It puzzles me, actually – there’s plenty of techfash who are in fact highly competent at the computer stuff. Where are they all?
Trump Social is also using an old code drop of Mastodon with known security holes. Probably not the best idea.
Note how Gab used the Mastodon code as well – and they still managed to screw up.
Yes, it was a good idea to use Mastodon. It just goes against the principles of that kind of software, so not surprising that they had to tweak it to conform to their authoritarian ideal, which contributed to their failure.
Правда was already taken.
Mastodon… Used to have an account. Never did much with it, me and social media just doesn’t work.
Still, maybe I should join “Truth” Social to have a front row seat for the crash-and-burn.
A British company called Trailar is considering suing Truth Social, because the T in their logo looks too much like Trailar’s.
https://www.trailar.co.uk/
For those unaware “Trurh” is “Pravda” in Russian.
I preferred “Der Sturmer”.
Barr Rebukes Trump as ‘Off the Rails’ in New Memoir
You may recall William P. Barr as one of Trump’s Attorneys General, and one of the worst of the aiders and abettors. Not interested in hearing anything he has to say, except maybe through prison bars.
I think the logo is telling. A big T for ‘truth’ but even more so for ‘Trump’. But you can also see it as a road sign. A greenish light under ‘definitely no turning left here!’ (It is also a lower-case r.) If this is intentional, one could call it clever, and so not Cheetolini’s.
None of the social media platforms have the capacity to launch “black ice” into the brain of people you dislike, nor do they have the bandwith to launch the AI in ‘Neuromancer’.
Personally, I prefer the term “treasonweasels.”
You have already done this.
Freethoughtblogs is a social media website.
Yes and no.
I’ve already abandoned the new one, OnlySky.
Their idea was good but the implementation was terrible.
They put the bloggers as an afterthought and it is hard to find both the bloggers and what the new blogging posts are. You have to hunt for them without a map or central list.
The comment program they chose is off the shelf and something with less functionality than DARPA/Usenet from the 1980s.
The results speak for themselves. Comment traffic on OPs are down about 90%.
@1 David Gerard:
Trump has a history of not paying for services rendered. All of the competent ones probably demanded money up front to work on an experiment that is hard to see ever being profitable.
As a California resident, I can only say that I’m happy that Devin Nunes quit his lucrative position in Congress to go work for Chump and company. And it’s particularly satisfying that he’s managed to get their project off to such a great start. I wonder if he’s getting paid. (Actually, I don’t give a f**k if he’s getting paid. In fact, I hope Chump stiffs him.)
@12 Yes,I am a bit disappointed in it,all the regular commentators do not seem to be there.
I miss Modus.
I read somewhere that Mastodon is not too happy with the tweaks they made, since the user agreement says you have to report to Mastodon what you’re doing to their software, and naturally the T-balls didn’t. They’re “looking into that” but I suspect they won’t do anything about it and will just wait for it to fail under its own weight.
Ridana@16, Usually, open-source licensing prohibits any modifications from being kept secret (which is slightly different from being published but I won’t go into that distinction), albeit there are many open source licensing variants. In any case, according to Ye Pffft! off All Knowledge:
According to the embedded link about the license (my added emboldening):
Without investigating further, the emboldened synopsis indicates hair furor’s site had to publish the (modified) source since, e.g., using my browser on my local computer or phone, I can communicate with it.
@16 Ridana
The GNU Affero license makes no such provision. You’re only required to distribute copies of the modified source code if you a.) distribute copies of the software or b.) with Affero: if your software communicates with users over a network. None of that involves telling Mastodon what you’re doing with their software.
I apologize if I sound grumpy; I understand if you didn’t mean to start rumors, but these software licenses live and die on popular misconceptions.
Well… I tried to log in and sign up to get on thruth social an all I got was: 405 Not Allowed!
So um yeah.