The Daily Fuckup

Truth Social entered the market with political baggage and a product problem. It was designed as a Trump-branded social network for users who wanted an alternative to the platforms that had suspended or banned him after Jan. 6, 2021. That raised expectations fast. It also meant the app had to do more than exist: it had to let people in.

By March 27, 2022, the app had launched on Apple’s App Store, but many users were still being routed to a waitlist instead of getting immediate access. That made the rollout look real, but still unfinished. Devin Nunes, then the company’s chief executive, had said the platform was supposed to be fully operational in the United States by the end of March. On March 27, that target was close enough to make the gap visible.

The result was a launch that looked more like a managed release than a fully open social network. For a startup, that can be normal. For Truth Social, it was a problem because the rollout itself was part of the pitch. The project was meant to show that Trump could build a media platform outside the companies that had shut him out. But when users still cannot reliably sign up, the message outruns the product.

That does not mean the app had collapsed by March 27. It had not. It had launched, drawn attention and kept generating headlines. But it still appeared to be in a limited rollout, and that left a basic question unresolved: whether the service could actually function at the scale its backers had promised.