Posted originally on the conservative tree house on April 8, 2022

During an interview with One America News {SEE HERE}, and another with The Washington Times {SEE HERE}, CEO Devin Nunes discussed the future of the social media platform Truth Social.

According to Mr. Nunes’ interview with the Washington Times, “Bottom line is it’s the fastest-growing social media company in history,” he said.  Also telling OAN and the Washington Times that a web-based version of the platform is likely to launch in the next several weeks which will allow all users to join.

Currently, the platform is exclusive to Apple users via an app access to create accounts and engage with the platform.  An Android version of the same app is anticipated soon.  Using the mobile platforms for user engagement, the company does not currently need extensive proprietary server hosting capacity.  However, to build out the web-based platform the data demand will require a significant expansion of server capacity.

It appears, from the interviews, that launching a web-based version of Truth Social [TruthSocial.com] will be coming in the next several weeks. As noted by the Times, “Truth Social’s critical startup move is to insulate the platform from Big Tech by using friendly servers that will keep it online. That web access to sign up on TruthSocial.com should happen in weeks; “Because we’re building this from scratch without using any of the tech tyrants, anyone who can cancel us, we have to go methodically, step by step, to ensure both quality and reliability,” Mr. Nunes says.

Washington Times Interview Here

Once they launch the web-based version of the platform, they are quickly going to have to figure out how to generate revenue.   Data service capacity and performance are very expensive.  That’s the reason why Twitter never included an edit feature before.

Each individual user engagement generates what’s known as “an ajax call”- a request to the server base.  Hitting a like button is an ajax call.  The reason the features cost so much money is the exponential scale of users on the platform.   If 1 million users are on the service when you hit a “like” button, the call and return from the server bank does not only need to show you the result, it also needs to show every other user the result.  With 1 million users, that translates to 1 million ajax call returns.

Facebook likely has a warehouse sized server bank just to handle the “like feature” all by itself.  Now, imagine the scale of server expansion needed to deliver an edited comment response to all simultaneous users on Twitter.  That’s why social media platforms are not profitable, they are still exhaustively expensive for data processing (functions per millisecond) and data capacity (simultaneous registered users).

Trust me, CTH is very well aware of how much these things cost.  I can only imagine the burn rate of cash Truth Social will incur as soon as everyone can gain access.  Their server banks will need to expand in scale and speed, likely to end up filling buildings the size of airports with hardware.  That doesn’t count the back-up systems.

People who want alternative free speech platforms, and yet simultaneously criticize the time it takes to get these systems up and running, most certainly do not understand the scale of the technical challenges and issues.   I can foresee Truth Social needing their own independent advertising platform also, which will essentially be like adding a Madison avenue executive set of offices to the organization.

They are going to need revenue that is not subject to the whims of other third-party payment processors and develop advertising systems outside the behemoth overlords at Google.  These are not easy challenges to overcome.