Mastodon's Founder Says Trump's New Social Network Is Just Mastodon

[douglas9]

Former President Donald Trump’s new social network ’Truth Social’ is seemingly a thinly disguised fork of popular social network codebase Mastodon.

Users have already found ways to create accounts on the site despite it not officially launching until later this year. With that access, screenshots that various users took show the site is very similar to Mastodon in appearance.

“Based on the screenshots I have seen, it absolutely is based on Mastodon,” Eugen Rochko, founder and lead developer of Mastodon told Motherboard in an email. He pointed to one screenshot of Truth Social’s error message, which is using the default Mastodon elephant mascot.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgm5k/truth-social-is-mastodon-trump

[douglas9]

1. Trump's social network has 30 days to stop breaking the rules of its software license

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) says former President Donald Trump’s new social network violated a free and open-source software licensing agreement by ripping off decentralized social network Mastodon. The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has 30 days to comply with the terms of the license before its access is terminated — forcing it to rebuild the platform or face legal action.

TMTG launched a special purpose acquisition company fundraising effort yesterday with promises to build a sweeping media empire. Its only product so far is a social network called Truth Social that appears strongly to be forked from Mastodon. While anyone can freely reuse Mastodon’s code (and groups like right-wing social network Gab have already done so), they still have to comply with the Affero General Public License (or AGPLv3) that governs that code, and its conditions include offering their own source code to all users.

Truth Social doesn’t comply with that license and, in fact, refers to its service as “proprietary.” Its developers apparently attempted to scrub references that would make the Mastodon connection clear — at one point listing a “sighting” of the Mastodon logo as a bug — but included direct references to Mastodon in the site’s underlying HTML alongside obvious visual similarities.


https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740354/trump-truth-social-network-spac-mastodon-license-software-freedom-conservancy?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

[SYFROYH]

2. A better Mastodon

[Progressive Jones]

3. JAM ! nt