"What The Fuck is Going On?" Trump Rages As His Social Media App Becomes Nothing But A Joke Three Weeks After Launch (It's Been 18 Days Since Trump Posted On His Own Site)

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It looks like we can add Truth Social, Trump's new social media virtual waiting room app to that impressive list of failures. Remember Trump's "From the Desk" blog from last year? It lasted only 29 days (May 4-June 2, 2021) before Trump deleted the entire thing because people were making fun of it and calling him a loser. So . . . will he also be deleting Truth Social?

Truth Social, which was hyped as a social media platform "game-changer", has been an embarrassing flop – and Trump is reportedly lashing out. (If it was me, I would not have put a guy with zero tech experience and best known for trying to sue a fictional cow for $250 million in charge of the whole project.) But all of his whining is being done privately (separate from his constant public whining). Trump boasts publicly that the app is beyond fantastic, super-popular, and getting even better. In unrelated news, Twitter investors are sleeping extremely soundly every night. (TS has steadily dropped on Apple's AppStore list of free aps. On Saturday alone, it sank from #72 to #140.)

Trump made his first post on February 15, telling everyone to "Get Ready!" He has not posted since then.

Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast, March 5, 2022:

During his presidency and in the years prior to his political rise, Trump had a famous reputation for berating underlings for failures that were mostly his own fault. Throughout all those years, his short attention span was a constant; he tends to quickly lose interest in novel business ideas, partnerships, and money-making gimmicks that oftentimes rapidly go nowhere—if not worse. . . .

The Daily Beast reviewed analyses of visits to Truth Social's performed by SimilarWeb, which tracks website traffic from public and private sources. The company's figures for the MAGA social network—while only an estimate based on incomplete data—are nonetheless anemic. Trump's own social media platform is doing either worse or the same as other MAGA social sites like Gab—another pro-Trump competitor website that's especially beloved by, well, Nazis—and Gettr, a platform fronted by one of Trump's former top political aides, Jason Miller. . . .

As of Friday, Truth Social was the 72nd most popular free app in Apple's AppStore, a far cry from Facebook (5th) and his formerly beloved Twitter (22), both of which booted the ex-president after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The relatively light traffic could be explained in part by Truth Social's waitlist—MAGA fans who want to join the platform have now racked up a million-strong backlog of users looking to join during the app's soft launch. The app is also only available on Apple devices, denying access to owners of Android phones. . . .

The odd sluggishness of the waitlist could also explain why, at this early stage of Trump's website, the MAGA fans who have visited Truth Social also don't tend to stay very long, according to SimilarWeb's analytical tools. The company estimates that the average visitor to Trump's site stays for just 90 seconds—a far cry from the seven minutes users tend to spend on Gettr and nine minutes spent on Gab.

In an appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando last week, Trump said the app's launch was still ongoing. "It's slowly been opened, people are getting on and they're loving the product and we're getting a voice," he claimed to a reporter from the pro-MAGA Right Side Broadcasting Network.

"It's been an incredible success," he claimed. "We have hundreds of thousands of people trying to get on and we're doing it very slowly."

The Emptiness Inside Donald Trump's New Social Media Platform
Ruby Cramer, Politico, March 5, 2022

Around 9:02 a.m. on Friday, an unexpected flash of purple appeared on my iPhone's lock-screen.

"Your wait is over! Tap here to start using Truth Social." . . .

Inside Truth Social, everything once blue was now a bright, jewel-toned purple. Tweets, a.k.a. posts, were now "Truths." Retweets were now "ReTruths," capital T. And above my username, I saw the site's default avatar: Twitter's cream-colored egg icon, the image given to all new users, had apparently given birth to a proud purple eagle. The rest of the site appeared familiar: Replies were still replies. Likes were still likes. Direct messages, still in development, were still direct messages. And Donald Trump was still @realDonaldTrump  . . . Only one Truth appeared on his page: "Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!" he wrote two weeks ago, before the app's launch. . . .

In my inbox, an unsigned email welcomed me to "our Truth Seeking community."

Most people are still awaiting entry to this purple-shaded landscape. Eleven days after its launch on Feb. 21, timed for the indistinct federal holiday that is President's Day, I was welcomed to Donald Trump's new online home after holding the 169,685th spot on the waitlist. (The line is hundreds of thousands of users long, according to other people waiting to get in.) . . .

[I]nside the app, digital tumbleweeds blew through my feed. The site is a bit slow, and a bit empty. Its stalled roll-out . . . has become a source of frustration and confusion in MAGA-world . . . Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy already have accounts and appear to be posting similar or identical content to both Truth Social and Twitter . . . (Apparently, no one is quite ready to turn their backs on an actual audience yet.) . . .

The most vigorous conversation on the site seems to be the entirely made-up one that appeared on the mock-ups before the launch. In the images available on the Apple app store, an account called @jack is seen corresponding with a man named Rick, making conversation like "What's your favorite place to go in the world? You won't believe how beautiful Jamaica is." Another mock-up, demonstrating the yet to be unveiled direct message feature, shows @jack asking someone named @jane to ask Truth Social's moderation team to take down an offensive account. "Are you sure you want to do that?" @jane replies. "I mean it's a pretty big deal censoring that content. Kinda an overreach… right?" In the mock-up @jack (perhaps a reference to Twitter's founder, Jack Dorsey) writes back, "JUST TAKE IT DOWN!" with a red-faced angry emoji. . . .

Around 10 a.m., I Truthed my first Truth.

"Anybody out there?" I wrote.

By the end of the day, no one had responded.

We need brain, but don't cry. Trump (a man with many friends) is looking into the oranges of the problem (no one does it better than he does) and - bing bing bong - some strong guys will make sure the billions (or however many, nobody knows) on the wait list are posting in two weeks. It'll be like the old days, believe me. Bye-bye.