Brace yourselves, Trump has just launched his social network

Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, security, platforms, and apps. That is a mixed bag. Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, artificial intelligence, security, platforms, and apps. That is a mixed bag. He likes to say "Bleh".

The inevitable happened. Donald Trump's social network, TRUTH, has just launched on the US App Store.

A lot has happened since Trump announced his new venture. The Digital World Acquisition Corp received $1 billion in December of last year to fund the Truth platform. The firm started testing the app in a closed alpha with around 500 users after rumors of the social network's imminent launch surfaced.

Last year, when Trump was in office, he was removed from major platforms.

Since then, he and his supporters have demanded a platform that fights the tyranny of Big Tech. Donald Trump Jr. even urged Musk to build one, but I guess he was busy somewhere else.

After no one responded to the call, Trump & Co. decided to build their own platform.

Conservative social media has been around for a while. Trump's Truth might be the ultimate flag bearer of the right, and a new home for people banned from mainstream platforms.

It'd be foolish to compare something like Truth to a social media platform.

Make no mistake, Trump and his partners are likely to make money hand over fist with the launch of TRUTH. But comparing what TRUTH is trying to accomplish to what Twitter’s doing is like comparing what Reddit did with GameStonk to what Warren Buffet’s done with his big tech investments over the past 30 years.

There are a lot of questions about how the platform will function, and how it will handle the inevitable challenges of moderation. Truth needs to avoid Parler's fate by keeping hate speech out. If it is removed from the App Store, it will lose its user base.

Now that the social network has launched, Trump supporters are out with their megaphones, claiming that the app is already a success, but most of them are on a waiting list. At the time of writing, Truth social's website is denying access to new visitors in order to avoid a distributed denial of service attack.

I have to give it to Trump for sticking to his conservative roots and launching a platform in 2022. For now, there is no TrumpCoin or TruthDAO. Only sad reacts.