Truth Social's debut: a 13-hour outage, a 500K waitlist and dead signup links

A Twitter-style social network from Trump Media & Technology Group, built on Mastodon's open-source software.

That Trump's banned audience would migrate to a home-grown Twitter clone fast enough to outgrow its broken rollout

After Twitter permanently banned Trump for inciting violence, Trump Media & Technology Group announced Truth Social, built on Mastodon open-source software, positioning it as an uncensorable alternative where Trump would post.

The grand debut in late February 2022 was marred by technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist that grew past 500,000 within days. The app was iOS-only with Android 'coming soon'; Ars Technica's tester created an account but stood at number 188,221 in the queue. The website's signup form returned '405 Not Allowed' errors and the links to the terms of service and privacy policy were dead. CEO Devin Nunes, the former congressman, promised Truth Social would be 'fully operational at least within the United States' by the end of March.

Truth Social debuted iOS-only with account creation throttled, so surging demand became a half-million-person waitlist instead of users.

Built on Mastodon's open-source code, the platform suffered a 13-hour outage and days of near-total inaccessibility at its debut.

Basic plumbing was unfinished: signup forms threw 405 errors and the terms-of-service and privacy-policy links were dead.

CEO Devin Nunes set a public deadline — fully operational in the US by end of March — that the first week's performance made hard to credit.

Launching to a waiting list is a press strategy, not a product: shipping an unfinished app to your most motivated users burns the audience the brand was built on.

As of 23 February 2022 a status page said developers had 'stabilized the account creation process' and were working to increase the rate of new account creation; the waitlist kept growing past 500,000 while Nunes repeated the end-of-March target.