TruXSocial is now TruX

The social platform Nicholic runs is now called TruX. Until today its name was TruXSocial.

That is the whole of the change. The rules, the accounts, the posts, the people on it and the address where it lives are what they were yesterday. What follows is why the old name went, why this one replaces it, what will still carry the old name for a while, and what this change is not.

Why the name TruXSocial had to go

Say TruXSocial out loud, then say Truth Social. They are very nearly the same sound.

Truth Social is a different social platform, run by a different company. It has no connection of any kind with Nicholic or with TruX. Written down and read carefully, the two names can be told apart. Spoken, half-heard across a room, typed from memory into a search box or glanced at in a list of apps, they often cannot.

That causes trouble in three directions, and none of them is small.

People looking for one find the other. Someone told about TruXSocial by a friend can search for what they think they heard and arrive somewhere else entirely. The same happens the other way round. Either way, a person ends up on a service they did not mean to choose, and may not notice.

People decide what it is before they look. Someone who has heard of Truth Social, and has a view of it, can see the name TruXSocial and assume they already know what it is, who runs it and what it stands for. They then judge it, kindly or harshly, on a resemblance, before reading a word of what it actually promises.

People assume a connection. A sister service, an imitation, a partner, a rival set up in answer to it. None of those is true, and a name that keeps suggesting one of them forces every honest description to begin by correcting it.

A name is the first claim anything makes about itself, and it is the one claim people believe before they have checked anything else. Everything Nicholic publishes is written so that it can be checked. A name that sends a reader to the wrong conclusion undoes that before the reader has started.

What this rename is not

It is worth being plain about this, because a change like this one is easy to misread.

It is not a statement about Truth Social, about the company that runs it, about the people who use it, or about anything said there. Nicholic takes no position on any of that here. The name would have changed for the same reason if the similar name had belonged to a service nobody had an opinion about. The problem is resemblance, not reputation.

It is also not a change of direction for TruX. It is not a new owner, a new set of rules, a new price, or a new product wearing the old one's clothes. A rename is a convenient moment to slip other changes in without anyone noticing, which is exactly why this one carries none.

Why the new name is TruX

TruX is not a new word to anyone who uses the service. It was already in the product. The menu entry for its paid subscription reads TruX Premium. When someone confirms their email address, the button that takes them in says Go to TruX.

The part of the old name that made the resemblance was the second word. With Social on the end, the two names share a shape: a short word beginning with Tru, followed by the same second word. Take Social away and that shape is gone. What is left is short, already familiar to the people who use it, and names nothing except the service itself.

Choosing a name that was already inside the product also means nobody has anything new to learn. The service has simply stopped answering to a longer name.

What does not change for people who use TruX

Nothing anyone has on TruX changes with its name. That includes:

• your account, and the way you sign in to it
• your posts, your followers and the people you follow
• your messages
• your supporter subscription, if you have one, and what it costs
• the five rules, which stay exactly as published

The address is still truxsocial.org, and every link anyone has already shared still leads where it did. The Android app still downloads from the same place.

There is nothing to do. No setting to change, no new app to fetch, no account to move.

Where you will still see the old name

A name does not change everywhere at once, and announcing this as though it had would not be true.

On the day this was written, the old name was still on:

• the service itself, in its own pages and in the title of a browser tab
• the Android app, as the name under its icon on a phone and the name of the file it downloads as
• the pages of this website that describe it, including the address of its page here

Those are being changed. Until each one is, both names will be in view, and both mean the same service. If the old name turns up somewhere after the change has had time to settle, it is a leftover, not a second product. Saying so at mail@nicholic.com reaches the person who can fix it.

What happens to everything already written under the old name

Things already published under the name TruXSocial stay as they were written: entries on the updates log, posts on this blog, and anything else that carries a date. They were accurate on the day they were written, and a dated record that quietly edits itself afterwards is no longer a record.

The pages that describe TruX as it is now are different. They describe the present, so they take the present name.

A reader going back through this site will find both names, and the date beside each one says which name applied at the time.

The second name this company has retired

This has happened once before. Nicholic used to carry a name that suggested a charity, and the name was dropped because Nicholic is not one. Keeping it would have meant telling every new reader something untrue before they had read a sentence. The about page has the short version.

The reason is the same in kind this time. TruXSocial was never a false name. It said, accurately, that this is a social platform called TruX. But it led people towards conclusions that were false, and a name that has to be corrected in the opening line of everything written about it costs more than it gives.

Both changes were cheaper made early. A name is easiest to change before it has been printed on more things and learned by more people, and waiting would only have made the same decision more expensive.

TruX is the same place it was yesterday. It now has a name that sounds like itself.