Good evening, Patriots! So, now I've been on TRUTH Social for about 2 days and I can share some of my thoughts about this new platform. There are a few pros and a few cons, so I thought I'd share them here with you guys first! There's a tip at the end so make sure to keep reading. BTW, I am @paralleleconomy on TRUTH Social so please make sure to follow me when you finally get in.

Pros:

The app is actually very well built. It's not ugly, its design is appealing, and the interface makes sense. It basically does the things you'd expect a social media app to do. So, all the people who assumed that President Trump would put out a janky app can go and eat a helping of crow now, because they were wrong.

Aside from the general design of the app, the profile section comes fairly standard with the things you’d expect. You get a header image and a profile photo, a description section and the ability to link to your website. It’s all the basics, so we’re good to go there. People have mentioned that it is basically a Twitter clone. It sorta is, but you get more room to write things, which I actually enjoy. Twitter’s 280 characters might be bigger than they allowed in the past, but it’s still too small for my taste. Each “TRUTH” (their version of a Tweet) can be up to 500 characters long. You can add links, pictures or videos to your TRUTH and sharing works quite well. BTW, the equivalent of a Retweet is a ReTruth.

Despite all the people who claimed that it was going to be a ghost town, there is definitely no shortage of people to follow. When you initially set up your account, there is a whole list of people who are already established on the platform that you can follow right away. I, of course, followed Dan Bongino (@DBongino) right off the bat, but I also followed a number of other well known accounts, including @RealDonaldTrump.

I can say that it is true that he has not yet posted anything other than a message telling everyone to get ready and that he’ll see us soon. My suspicion is that the President is waiting for the app to be opened up to everyone (on the iOS platform at least) which is rumored to be scheduled for the end of March. Although, I have no inside information on that, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Another thing that I noticed, especially on day 2 is that the app is handling the load quite well. I read a number of articles lambasting TRUTH Social for the slow roll out, but one thing I haven’t noticed yet is any of the sorts of hiccups that used to be a staple of other platforms. Twitter used to fail so often in the early days that they invented a mascot for their website when it went down known as the “Fail Whale”.

There is a very functional search feature that allows you to search for Profiles (people) Truths and Hashtags. I’ve tested it out searching for a number of people and found it to be very useful.

Cons:

I do think that the fact that President Trump hasn’t posted anything recently is a bit of a bummer. It’s not the end of the world, especially since there are so many people already on the site, but I’m sure that there are lots of folks that miss some good, old fashioned “mean tweets”. They don’t have to be mean, but it would be nice to hear from him again on a social media platform.

Another minor issue I noticed yesterday (not as much today) was the fact that featured images weren’t loading when you shared links. I shared a few news articles and their images (i.e. the featured images from the articles) weren’t pulling into TRUTH Social. So, it looked like basically just a hyperlink. As I mentioned, this hasn’t happened yet today, but yesterday, none of my featured images were pulling into my posts.

There appears to be a Direct Messages feature in the app, but currently it is not functioning. When you open it up, there’s a message waiting for you that says, “Hello A new direct messaging experience will be available soon. Please stay tuned.” It’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have the ability to Direct Message people on the platform. Hopefully this feature gets enabled quickly.

There have been a few times when I tried to load my feed and nothing loaded. When I say “few” that is exactly what I mean. I think this has happened about 3 times total. However, it was an issue so I thought it merited mentioning.

One major issue that I have with the platform as a whole, i.e. rather than just the app, is the lack of a web interface. In my opinion, this is a major drawback. Personally, I prefer to use a web interface where possible. It’s just easier to type with a full keyboard and I prefer to share pictures and links from my computer as well. Especially if I designed a meme or something in Photoshop, it’s just easier to upload from my computer.

The lack of a web interface brings with it yet another even larger downside, however. What do you think is going to happen if someone somewhere does something stupid (i.e. January 6-ish) and it turns out that they discussed it on the app? What if someone stages such an event / social media posts on the app? I am old enough to remember what they did to Parler in response to January 6th.

Despite the fact that the majority of planning actually happened on Facebook and Twitter, they kicked Parler off both major app stores and then off of the internet altogether. It worries me that there is not a web interface for this social network, specifically because I’ve seen these big tech companies in action before. I’m pretty sure Apple would be more than happy to kick TRUTH Social off the app store for any convenient reason.

Overall, I actually really do like this app. I really wish Donald Trump would start posting stuff and I worry a lot about the lack of a web interface. However, it is aesthetically pleasing, feature rich, fairly smooth functioning and definitely well populated. I’m really enjoying using TRUTH Social and look forward to the app being opened up to everyone currently stuck on the waiting list, as well as our fellow patriots on Android.

Hot Tip:

One of the fastest ways to grow your followership is by following other people. This is a tip that I am not going to share too widely because at the moment the good folks at TRUTH Social seem to be overlooking something that other platforms have already clamped down on. We’ll consider this a loophole for speed-growing your following. When I first joined Parler, I could follow as many people as I wanted and about half of them would follow me back. So, I just started following people. LOTS of people. I followed tens of thousands of people, in fact.

However, eventually the techs at Parler realized that all of this mass-following was putting additional strain on their servers, so they put a rate limit on the number of people you could follow in a given amount of time. So, the hot tip is this; if you are someone that is concerned with building a large following as quickly as possible (perhaps for a small business), make sure to start following as many people as you can immediately. Eventually, the techs at TRUTH Social are going to figure out what their counterparts at Parler did and they are very likely to shut that capability off by adding a rate limit. If you want to get in on this loophole, you’ll want to act quickly!