Or shoot, get a dev team together to write a microblogging platform hosted at whitehouse.gov. Then they could even write a client that was secure enough to run on the president’s cell phone, and they don’t have to worry about third-party interests (if they exist). Just have whatever is posted on that site mirrored to @POTUS on Twitter, and if that get suspended, then the primary source still exists.
I'm really torn with this idea. It would be really good solution to the problem for him and twitter/facebook.
But, thinking of this from the new network point of view - I do not wish any good alternative social network to suddenly receive an influx of extreme trumpers following him. That could basically make it the new Voat and poison the idea unless there's some serious coordination around which nodes are excluded. Imagine the effect of him twitting that he's moving his presence to Mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@usercount claims ~530k users now. Trump has 80.2M followers. Even if only 1% of them is ready to move, that's a new mastodon.social by itself.
Yeah, this administration failing to move the conversation/information dissemination to government-run platforms is mindblowing to me. Setup a Syncloud node and have the President tell everyone to follow him on Diaspora. Get high-profile supporters (Kanye) to parrot the message and also cross-post their content. Trump has incredible reach and influence as a social media personality (witness HK protesters carrying Trump/Rocky meme images), but he is failing himself by staying beholden to obviously-hostile private platforms.
Remember when the press wanted to stop the President's daily briefings?[1] He should have used that opportunity to setup a podcast or video stream system, minus the press, who are 90% bad faith actors anyway. "America, hear what I have to say, unfiltered by the talking heads at CNN! Just download the WhiteHouseNews app!" etc....
This is a man who wants to retrofit the carrier fleet to use steam powered catapults because he found all the computers confusing[0]. You think anyone would even bother trying to explain any of that to him? He uses Twitter because it's the only thing he's comfortable with.
Which puts the onus on the Whitehouse IT department to produce a UX that is seamless enough for even Trump to transition to.
Our EM aircraft catapults are crap right now, although this is due more to "concurrent development" than an inherent failure of the concept. Trump seems to intuitively grasp certain problems (China = Public Enemy #1, lax border security, etc...) but then draws really odd conclusions on how to solve them, and doubles down with the most retarded cringe-worthy rhetoric imaginable.
Most of his 'brand' is based on Twitter these days. I would doubt that he will do much of anything. You know all of the posts here on HN about basing your entire company on the platform of someone else? Well, here is a good example.