The funniest thing about Truth Social is that it’s a fork of Mastodon.
Mastodon.world cost $1200 to run last month. And running it was hobby-level effort by a guy who admins lemmy.world AND has a proper day job and family.
They’re selling ads and have a couple web devs to tweak their version of Mastodon, and they can’t even pull in enough ad revenue to make that work. 😆
Fucking clown shoes.
How the hell is M.World costing $1200 a month ! ? Its not that heavy on activity. Uni or Mastodonapp.uk probably has more and costs less to run. I mean I run cupoftea.social with 5000 users at £80 a month.
They openly post their finances, you can take a look: https://blog.mastodon.world/
The $1200 is for both mastodon.world and lemmy.world combined, but yeah. Most of it (80%) is going towards Hetzner, which is their cloud storage/hosting provider.
Clone Twitter, a famously unprofitable business, then remove cool celebrities and fill it with Nazis, misogynists, and other people that advertisers and their customers hate.
Profit?
The amount of evidence it has gathered for future FBI investigations?…priceless
I know people who ostensibly voted for this chode because of his businesses acumen.
to whom?
who got the money?
Since launching in early 2022, former President Donald Trump‘s Truth Social took in $3.7 million in net sales, and lost $73 million.
The loss is, presumably, the amount of money they spent that year in operating costs, etc.
In business, a loss is when a company’s expenditures are more than its income. It’s not like the money is “lost” as in “missing” or “lost in a bet” at a casino. Truth Social spent more money than it made in 2022, which means they operated at a loss for 2022.
I find it hard to believe that a website the size of Truth Social (i.e. pretty small… They have a total of 2 million users, a generous 15% of them might be active. It isn’t Twitter) managed to rack up $73 million in costs over a single year of operation.
I see two possibilities. Either whoever is hosting them is charging them a stupendously exorbitant amount of money to keep their website online, because they hate them or because they know they have Trump & Co in a vise and can charge whatever they want; or else a lot of “operating costs” look like the inside of various pockets. Perhaps both. Probably both, now that I think about it, though I suspect the latter quite a bit more.
I run an instance of Lemmy with 300 users and it costs me about $223 per year.
They have 6000x more users. So it should cost them about… $1.5m
(Of course I know that’s completely unrealistic and things don’t scale like that. Just a fun exercise.)
But yeah that’s way too much for a site that only serves 2 million people.
There are a number of details in the article which explain where the money went. Did you read it?
