"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
I think the key there is funding from big companies. There's tons of standards and the like in which big companies take part - both in terms of code and financial support. Big projects like the rust compiler, the Linux kernel, blender, etc. all seem to have a lot of code and money coming in from big companies. Sadly there's only so much you can get from individuals - pretty much the only success story I know of is the wikimedia foundation.
I may be wrong but I thought they were majority user funded.
edit: looking at their funding reports it seems that way, but I may be misinterpreting it.
Wikimedia foundation is, none of the other things I listed are.
I meant Blender, they seem to be majority funded by regular people.
I just checked their financial report for 2022 and it looks like 50% came from patron funding (which looks like entirely companies like Google), 5% from epics grant, and then 10% corporate membership. 20% came from individuals, and the rest from random other miscellaneous things like the blender market. If you search blender foundation annual report 2022, the finances breakdown will be near the end of the slides.
Ahh, that was just me misunderstanding what patron meant, my bad.
It looks like on blender's website there's 6 entities on there, and one of them does seem to be an individual fwiw. Here's his website: https://aras-p.info/.
The rest all seem to be corporations though - meta, aws, some game company I've never heard of, AMD, and epic.