Trump’s new social media site collapses after trolls flood it before launch | Hacker News Reader

Trump’s new social media site collapses after trolls flood it before launch

dailydot.com

40 pointsnickthegreek7 comments

Also interesting - it's being touted as proprietary code, but View Source (which as we all know is a clever hacker tool only) revealed that it's a fork/instance of Mastodon. Complete with not changing the error page's sad cartoon. The theme was slightly different, and the "toot" button has been renamed to "truth"... This is probably a violation of Masto's license, to not say you're using it.

Still remains to be seen whether or not federation support was planned to be enabled, as far as I can tell. But I can't help but find it amusing, as some people on masto talked about last night, that it's using the same core technology as Gab does/did - and the entire fediverse basically banded together to defederate from that instance.

> Also interesting - it's being touted as proprietary code, but View Source (which as we all know is a clever hacker tool only) revealed that it's a fork/instance of Mastodon. Complete with not changing the error page's sad cartoon. The theme was slightly different, and the "toot" button has been renamed to "truth"... This is probably a violation of Masto's license, to not say you're using it.

Mastodon is AGPL. If they really did just rip it off, at a bare minimum they have to provide the source upon request. From the AGPL:

It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.

See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947713

Where it basically boils down to Trump's social media venture making him $250M (-expenses), via a SPAC deal, regardless of whether it's successful or not.

So presumably a good outcome for him would be to (a) hire the cheapest employees, (b) create a bunch of headlines, (c) sell more stock pre-launch, (d) fail to launch, & (e) blame the failure on Big Tech.

The site admins knew that was going to happen right?

Based on the fact that the URL leaked, and that people were able to signup before the site launched, I'm gonna say that Trump didn't hire the best people for this job, and now I wonder if they are even going to get paid for any of the work they put-in

Big sad.

Maybe set up your own private Mastodon instance if you don't want to get censored. Being beholden to someone else's platform will always make you a second-class netizen.

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