The IT Nerd

You might have been following my stories about former President Donald Trump launching his own social media platform as he’s been banned from pretty much every other social media platform on the planet. But to get to the point of launching, here’s what has happened to date:

• The site was announced and was set up for testing, and then got pwned pretty quickly.
• The site turned out to be using an open source social media platform called Mastodon, which got him into trouble as he was using it outside of the licensing terms and was looking at being sued. But then he kind of fixed that by publishing open source code related to the site. Though that was kind of lame.

Now it seems that the site is launching for real as the app is on Apple’s app store in the US with a “coming soon” for the Android App. But in typical Trump fashion, it’s not going well. Many of those downloading the app have been unable to use it, due to a variety of error messages when attempting to register an account. Here’s what CNET reported:

People who download the app reported seeing error messages when they tried entering a birthdate, e-mail or phone number to create an account. “Something went wrong. Please try again,” the message read. 

Others reported they were placed on a waitlist after signing up. “Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist,” read the message, which included a waitlist number. 

Others are seeing stuff like this:

Very stable start for Truth Social pic.twitter.com/9ey6G9LoOr

— James Titcomb (@jamestitcomb) February 21, 2022

Honestly given what has gone on to date, I am not at all shocked by this as I said this in December:

I seriously doubt that it will get more interesting because these humans clearly have no clue what they are doing. One just cannot spin up a social media site out of thin air as that’s something that takes the Facebook’s and Twitter’s of the world years to do. Take my word for it, this site is unlikely to see the light of day. And even if it does, it is likely to be a train wreck next to a dumpster fire.

Surprise. We have a train wreck next to a dumpster fire in progress.

The thing is, this could get worse. I say that because I can see a scenario where something is said on this site which leads to it getting punted from the App Store. That’s what happened to Parler last year when they got punted from both the App Store and the Google Play store for their bad behaviour. And it was a difficult road for them to return to the either store in a limited fashion. That’s on top of being taken down by AWS which forced them to find a new host. Which of course didn’t go well. On top of that, the SEC is currently investigating a merger between the platform’s parent firm and a special purpose acquisition company. Which likely will make life miserable for the company.

It will be fun to watch, and laugh at this rather pitiful attempt by Trump to launch a social media platform.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2022 at 8:29 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Trump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.