Trump’s social app marred by bugs and apparent ban on Devin Nunes cow accounts

Enlarge / Trump decided to make his own social network after being banned from Twitter. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

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.

Truth Social is available only on iOS. I used the iOS app to sign up on Monday, to test whether I could create an account despite all the technical problems. My account was created, but I am still #188,221 on the waiting list. An Android app is supposedly "coming soon" to the Play Store. A status-update page said Monday that Truth Social developers have "stabilized the account creation process" and "are working to increase the rate of new account creation." Truth Social was built using Mastodon open source software.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments