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:

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.

You might recall that Donald Trump was trying to set up a social network, and it promptly got pwned within hours. Not only that, it was using an open source social networking platform called Mastodon improperly. And I speculated that this would become a problem for Trump.

Surprise, it’s now a problem for Trump according to The Verge:

This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon’s software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump’s group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so. 

While Truth hasn’t officially launched yet, internet users discovered that a test version basically had the same interface as Mastodon, and that some of the code for the site was unchanged from the other social network’s code. By itself, that’s actually the intended use of open-source software — but as the Software Freedom Conservancy pointed out last week, apps or websites based on software that uses the AGPLv3 license have to in turn provide their own source code. According to the foundation that wrote AGPL, it’s meant to make the community’s software better: if you improve on something that someone else made, they should be able to benefit from your work like you did theirs. 

As Mastodon and Rochko reiterated on Friday, though, TMTG hasn’t done that — it even went as far as to call its software “proprietary,” and seemingly tried to hide the fact that it was based on Mastodon. Now that the Truth has been revealed, however, TMTG will either have to rebuild it without using Mastodon’s code — a tall order, as bootstrapping a social network site isn’t particularly easy — or release its source code and change the terms of service.

Now it will be interesting to see what Trump’s team does. Do the publish the code or start over scratch? And it will be interesting to see what Mastodon does if Trump’s team doesn’t comply. I am betting the word “lawsuit” will enter the conversation.

Stay tuned folks.