Trump Media &Technology Group's (TMTG) new social app "Truth Social," which is meant to "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," launched on Presidents' Day, but potential users are still reporting long waitlists in order to access the app and read posts and interact on the platform.
A large part of former President Donald Trump's success in getting his message out was his huge popularity on Twitter, racking up some 90 million followers at one point, as PC Mag pointed out. An online archive of his past tweetsreminds the public of just how prolific the former president was on the platform, in many ways pioneering its use as a real-time communication tool for a president to speak to their base.
After multiple social media giants banned Trump from their platforms, the former president tried posting Twitter-like updatesto a blog, but it just wasn't the same. Then the idea to launch Truth Social came to fruition. The company is run by TMTG, also seen as T Media Tech LLC in some branding, with former U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes acting as its CEO.
Since the launch of Truth Social, many have been reporting long waitlists after downloading the app and signing up for an account.
After downloading the app this week and creating an account, the process was fairly smooth and straightforward. The prompts asked for an email for verification to be provided, and then after additional prompts, a message popped up on the screen that said, "Your account has been created successfully!"
So after expecting to get in and read messages and posts to see how everyone is interacting on the social app, none of that happened and instead, a screen appeared showing that there would only be what appeared to be a long waiting list with at least 1,163,386 others ahead, in line.
The message also read, "Thank you for joining! Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist. We love you, and you're not just another number to us. But your waitlist number is below."
While it's hard to tell the authenticity of interactions on the app and see how robust the conversations are without being able to get in and view what's happening ahead of the waitlist, the Daily Beast reported on some numbers released by the web traffic analysis site SimilarWeb which showed a sharp drop in traffic after the app's Presidents' Day launch.
According to their data, Truth Social had what was described as a sharp spike in users at around 2 million daily visits to the site, when it was first launched. Then the numbers dropped to an average of about 300,000 daily visits.
As the Daily Beast and Business Insider reported, data has shown that competitors like Gab and Gettr are doing better so far, with the latter launched by one of Trump's former top aides Jason Miller. And Gab was even reportedly banned by Apple and Google.
