In among the least surprising pieces of news ever, Donald Trump’s social-media app Truth Social is turning out to be a huge flop. The site, which wants to be a conservative version of Twitter (which booted Trump from its site after the riot at the Capitol on January 6), debuted a little more than a month ago, but downloads of its app at the Apple Store have plummeted to an estimated 60,000 a week, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower. Though there’s supposedly a waitlist with a million names on it, the site itself, according to Forbes columnist John Brandon, looks like the proverbial “ghost town.” Donald Trump, Jr. is assiduously posting away on the site. But it feels like he’s mostly yelling into the void.

To be fair, creating a new social media site from whole cloth is a major challenge. Social-media companies benefit from network effects, so that the more users a site has, the more attractive it becomes others. That it makes it hard to dislodge existing players, since the simple fact that they have lots of users makes people want to stick around.

But the argument for Truth Social was that it could solve this problem because it had a ready-made core audience in the form of right-wingers (and specifically Trump supporters) who were annoyed with the liberal dominance and content-moderation policies of Twitter and would be more than happy to leave that site to hang out with other MAGAheads. Truth Social, the promise went, would offer them the opportunity to say what they want without fear of censorship, free of whinging liberals.

So what went wrong? Some of it, to be sure, is a function of the fact that the launch of Truth Social, like so much else in Trump’s career, has been half-assed. Trump has yet to post since launch day, preferring instead to issue press statements that then get posted to Twitter, which is where he plainly wants to be. People who downloaded the app but were put on a waiting list are still there weeks later, which suggests a lack of investment in the back end. And Trump himself has done surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) little to promote the site.

Beyond that, though, Truth Social faces a more fundamental problem, which is that it’s not really clear most right-wingers only want to hang out with other right-wingers. To be sure, some do — but they already have social-media apps like Gab and Gettr, where denizens of the far right can indulge their penchant for conspiracy theories and complain about the New World Order to their heart’s content. But a big part of right-wing identity today is built around the idea of “owning the libs.” That’s why one of the constant refrains from right-wingers on social media is “Why don’t you debate Ben Shapiro (or whomever)?” In other words, they don’t want to just be right. They also want to prove their correctness to liberals, and show them to be fools in the public eye.

The conventional take on social media and network structure is that social media isolates us from those who feel differently than we do, putting us into echo chambers that reinforce ideological homogeneity. But while it’s true that most right-wingers inhabit echo chambers in terms of the media they consume — particularly broadcast media — when you look at analyses of social networks on places like Twitter, it’s not true that right-wingers do not interact with people they disagree with. On the contrary, they interact with them plenty, even if only to argue with them and try to dunk on them. The appeal of echo chambers, it turns out, may be somewhat overrated, given that trolling libs and lecturing them about all the things they don’t understand are, in fact, things right wingers love to do on Twitter. And they can’t do any of those things on Truth Social. In that sense, the basic problem Truth Social faces is pretty straightforward: you can’t own the libs if there are no libs around.