Truth Social

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https://truthsocial.com/

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Trump’s social network has 30 days to stop breaking the rules of its software license
Truth Social ripped off open-source platform Mastodon

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740354/trump-truth-social-network-spac-mastodon-license-software-freedom-conservancy

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) says former President Donald Trump’s new social network violated a free and open-source software licensing agreement by ripping off decentralized social network Mastodon. The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has 30 days to comply with the terms of the license before its access is terminated — forcing it to rebuild the platform or face legal action.

TMTG launched a special purpose acquisition company fundraising effort yesterday with promises to build a sweeping media empire. Its only product so far is a social network called Truth Social that appears strongly to be forked from Mastodon. While anyone can freely reuse Mastodon’s code (and groups like right-wing social network Gab have already done so), they still have to comply with the Affero General Public License (or AGPLv3) that governs that code, and its conditions include offering their own source code to all users.

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Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform, where many of them created prank accounts that flooded the service with false company announcements and even fake Donald Trump posts. (The platform has since been replaced by a waitlist.) The SFC demands that TMTG offer all these users access to the Truth Social source code. “If they fail to do this within 30 days, their rights and permissions in the software are automatically and permanently terminated,” Kuhn says.

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Trump’s TRUTH Social launches at the top of the App Store, but no one can get in
Amanda Silberling @asilbwrites / 8:40 AM PST
February 21, 2022

https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/21/trumps-truth-social-app-launch-store-errors/

Donald Trump’s media group released its TRUTH Social iOS app today in the U.S., but a scan of the app’s API using publicly available tools revealed that it already closed itself to registrations (also, the scan showed that its “proprietary account registration microservice” is named “Pepe,” which is also the name of a meme with racist connotations).

Though TRUTH Social sits at the #1 spot for free downloads in Apple’s App Store, most users can’t get into the app. When you download TRUTH Social, you’re prompted to enter your email and date of birth (users must be 18+) before waiting for a verification email. But at every step of the process, TechCrunch received error messages. Once we received a verification email, the link yielded more error messages, making it impossible to create an account. Some users have reported being placed on waitlists with over 100,000 users, while others never received verification emails or couldn’t move past the verification step. TechCrunch reached out to the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) for comment on these sign-up difficulties.

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