Not even remotely true, this is a myth. Most of what they spend is on development, operations, and legal. They publish their 990 online which gives the breakdown. IIRC the foundation gets like 2%.

Slightly more than 1% of their annual revenue.

I had a substitute teacher who saw the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth ads against John Kerry and repeated it to the class like it was 100% fact.

Yeah, you start seeing the full multiverse. It’s crazy.

But ultimately I have come to the conclusion that twice is too often to be a coincidence

Wait, who said anything about twice? I think you’re dead on about the second term, I think it was intentional. Just the first term was the dog that caught the car.

I think that credits them with a little bit too much conscious attention. I think they were surprised to even win and kind of bumbled through and were able to retrospect with the look back at that experience and think about what to do once they had a second chance. So I did set up a second term, but I don’t regard that as having been part of a singular intentional plan. Like another commenter in this thread said the dog caught the car in the first term.

Indeed, the way to combat bad media is to dispute it with good media, not hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I would call this a marketplace of ideas fallacy. Rumor and misinformation rise to the top ever bit as much as good argument, and poisoning those conversations with bad faith is now part of an explicit ideological strategy to weaponize those spaces. That phenomenon is as real as thoughtful deliberation, I would say more so.

So if you believe "combat bad with good’ works as a matter of practice, I think that argument is obviously unsustainable. If it’s “bad things will happen but we should keep it that way as a matter of principle” it’s at least a more coherent argument. I wouldn’t agree with it but I can understand why someone would find it at least a respectable idea.

that refused to play certain songs

Nazism songs.

The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi,

No but 100 copies of back issues of “Being A Nazi In 2025 The Magazine” probably would, and the present case is more like the latter.

tell me what content is or isn’t permissable

Nazism being the content

based on their political beliefs

Nazism being the political belief.

And how are they defining alt right?

It’s music tags that literally have phrases like nazi or white power in the phrase.

Yeah I like being able to opt-in to a specific block list, or having it enabled by default but individual instances can disable it (more to neutralize bad faith arguments from trolls who want to normalize nazism), even though I want it effectively banned.

It’s like 6 or 7 tags that all have the word “nazi” or “white power” in the tag. As long as Sam Hunt tracks are not being encoded that way he should be good.

If by dozens you mean 50,000?

I remember in the early days people saying that Lemmy wasn’t succeeding. Very frustrating to hear because it was like the very early days. And look at it now!

Apparently it’s feeling the Lemmy hug of death: https://archive.is/Z9Udy

It also took me a second but I got there

Removed by mod

The fediverse architecture was built from the beginning to allow instance-by-instance exercise of discretion to mute any systemic effects that could take over the network as a whole.

This was I think oriented toward limiting swarming behavior from trolls, but I think it also applies to AI bots.

Right now it seems that the Fediverses main protection is that it just isn’t a juicy enough target for wide scale spam and bad faith agenda pushers.

If you ask me they are already here right now, but I think it’s not the architecture of the fediverse, but the judgment of individual mods that have let us down in this case.

I actually agree. I feel like there was a different ethos back in the earlier web that information density was a-ok. It feels like years more usable than just-in-time loading modules and constant clicking through pages.

That’s not something I see on masto but maybe I’m missing something