this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Today I Learned

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[–] squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi 67 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Yep, it's a fork

On October 21, 2021, the Software Freedom Conservancy group stated they suspected Truth Social had violated Mastodon's AGPLv3 license by not offering its source code to all users. The Mastodon developers then formally requested that Truth Social comply with the terms of the software license, with Truth Social publishing its source code as a ZIP file on the website on November 12, 2021. On February 22, 2022, the source code download was moved to the website's legal section. A mirror of the source code is available at GitHub, where it was uploaded by uninvolved individuals. Wikipedia

[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 60 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Of course they violated the licence. I'm not even surprised that they did that, but i am somewhat puzzled by the fact that they did publish the source when asked to.

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 25 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Make a bingo card out of the phrases:

  • "We didn't do anything wrong."
  • "We paid Company X to do that."
  • "What's a computer license?"
  • "How much do they want?"
  • "If it's free then why are we talking?"
  • "If it's free then what did we pay Company X for?"
  • "What does GNU mean?"
  • [... some time later ...]
  • "Can't we just pay them?"
  • "Don't pay Company X because they fucked this up."
  • "Why do we have to give everyone the changes we paid for?"
  • "Whatever. I don't want to hear about this again."

Add your own phrases. It's a fun game for all ages.

[–] prex@aussie.zone 7 points 2 days ago

Pay them? They should be paying us.

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 5 points 2 days ago

I'm not. The only thing they got going for them is the nazi in chief. The software was never the point.

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 days ago

One of the big smoking guns in this whole debacle was that people could reproduce known bugs in Mastadon in Truth Social, which basically made it impossible to deny that it wasn't a clone.

[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Shitty, but at least they complied with the license at the end.

Edit: I was wrong

[–] homes@piefed.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

No, they didn’t. That’s the point.

[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Is the source avalible?

At the end, the license terms are met

Knowing how incompetent trump is in everything he does, the people he employedfor the job didn't know anything about software licenses

Edit: I was wrong

[–] homes@piefed.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Is the source avalible?

Yeah, the license

At the end, the license terms are met

No, they weren’t. That’s the point.

[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

https://help.truthsocial.com/legal/open-source/

As far as I can see, it's the newest version of truth/mastadon.

What terms of the AGPL license aren't met.

[–] homes@piefed.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)
[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fine, you're right, that version isn't the newest one and isn't released according to AGPL license.

[–] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

It’s refreshing to see someone admit they were wrong. It shouldn’t be a big deal because we’ve all been there.

[–] Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The problem is that the source code wasn't uploaded by them.

[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world -2 points 2 days ago

Who released it then? I'm not talking about the github mirror

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 44 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You think these fucks could possibly make anything of their own? Of course they went for a (free) off-the-shelf solution.

[–] starlinguk@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nope. No imagination and no desire to improve anything.

[–] tourist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I'm going to guess any critical vulnerabilities patched on the main branch since their fork might still be in there

oh well

their problem

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 29 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not only is it Mastodon, but before it released a bunch of folks went and looked it up. They realized it was Mastodon, but had no attribution. So Mastodon sent a 30 day notice to properly display the open source licensing or lose access to it. If they refused, then Mastodon could have taken them to court and almost certainly have easily won.

While I don't like Trump, or what he stands for, this is the power of open source. You want to create your own toxic sewage social network? You can. You want to create your own growing, beautiful, welcoming, social network, you can. You can build anything you want.

[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

It's not the power of open source. It's the power of copy left licenses.

[–] webkitten@piefed.social 18 points 2 days ago

Not only just a fork but an extremely outdated fork of Mastodon which most instances have defederated from.

[–] 0ndead@infosec.pub 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Not only that, but they didn’t change the default admin password, leading to Truth Social to immediately being ~~hacked~~ pwned.

[–] MrKoyun@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Oh, I guess right wing facists taking open source projects to make their own platforms is quite the trend.

Next Social, a Turkish platform made by the son-in-law of Erdogan was marketed as being national and locally made. It's literally just blue mastodon. Basically a one-to-one copy. They even breached the open source license, leading to this embarrassing fiasco!

[–] dreamy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago

Lmao, I saw their website before and really thought that they had built something new.

We have Pardus as well, which just turned out to be an Ubuntu reskin.

[–] notsosure@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago
[–] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] nagaram@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

I'm shocked Gab is still around.

I used a spam email address to subscribe to that guys mailing list and every time I use that email to sign up for something sketchy, I see he's still sending 3-9 emails a day with rants and updates.

You'd think owning a social media would entail cryptic ranting on the platform and not a mailing list