Which is why alternative apps are definitely putting the word “discord” in their metadata to get close to Discord in search results without fear of trademark infringement.
Outside right-wing grifters, considering the gullibility of the right probably MLMs and those “free” hat/watch/whatever that’s not actually free and automatically adds you to a monthly subscription. Oh and don’t forget the shitty right-wing services like patriot wireless and their I’m sure equally shitty beer ultra right beer.
I’ve actually thought of opening a business that panders to conservatives but donates proceeds to progressive groups. Give it the good ol’ fashioned God Guns n Glory treatment so it’s passable as a conservative business, but donate to things like the Trevor Project and liberal lobbyist groups.
A lot of people in the third world do this because it’s not like anyone is going to check and the harmful consequences are happening in the very countries keeping them poor in the first place so it’s practically no downside for them.
Not hard to crank out product for something like that, just take today’s borderline hate slogan, slather it in red white and blue and put it up for sale.
If they did it wouldn’t do much, since most Mastodon instances are strongly opposed to anything even vaguely right so a federated Truth Social would immediately be defederated by at least a third to half of instances with any user base.
Hell, several of the Mastodon mobile apps implemented blacklists into the app so you couldn’t use instances the app developer didn’t like with their app. When you see a Mastodon mobile app with negative reviews about “the largest Mastodon instance” that’s what was going on - when Gab switched to a Mastodon back end around 2019 it technically immediately became the largest Mastodon instance and several of the mobile apps blacklisted it at the app level.
Oh no doubt. I didn’t know Gab was mastodon though, that’s interesting. It’s pathetic how these conservative products launch as “a new social media network for conservatives”, and it’s actually… just Mastodon. Gab even moreso since it ended up relaunching as Mastodon later.
It’s pathetic how these conservative products launch as “a new social media network for conservatives”, and it’s actually… just Mastodon. Gab even moreso since it ended up relaunching as Mastodon later.
Using an existing, generally stable open source solution that has the features you need isn’t pathetic, it’s generally a good idea. It’s like complaining that some websites run on Apache, even if you don’t agree with their politics and even if Apache devs publicly don’t agree with their politics.
What it tells you is that Mastodon does a good job at what it does, mostly.
The service, the website it’s running on and the phone app were all new things created for Trump though. I don’t see anything saying anything about what the back end runs on.
Let me use a huge internet company that isn’t tied to Trump and isn’t a conservative thing for a comparison. Netflix uses at least 3 different open source Apache products as part of their tech stack, and that isn’t the **only **open source stuff they use. No one is going to argue that Netflix is lying about providing a new/separate service just because there’s quite a bit of open source in their stack, especially on the back end (including stream processing).
Hell, there’s a term LAMP that has been used because the specific combination of Linux OS, Apache web server, mySQL database and PHP scripting was so fucking common - all of those are open source and at least one of those is part of the back end of a lot web sites you likely visit (including Wikipedia, Facebook and Slack which all use LAMP). Apache is the web server software for something like 30% of websites.
It’s the same thing with Truth Social and Gab - they built a new site, running a new service , with their own newly coded mobile app, that runs modified Mastodon as a core part of their back end. The AGPL (the license Mastodon is under) also requires distributing the source they use, including any modifications, so the source code behind both sites is freely available.
