Wonder if it's related to this...

"Data from another platform, Coinglass, showed that nearly $1 billion worth of cryptocurrencies had been liquidated over the past 24 hours, with the bulk being on digital exchange Bitfinex."

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/04/business/bitcoin-plunges-over...

It would be fascinating to know who owned all that.

Although it won't give you a direct answer to that question, Dark Money by Jane Meyer gives a well researched insight in some of these highly politically relevant undisclosed flows of money.

So it's not just the social media. According to the slide deck published on their website[0] it's also a news channel and an on-demand streaming service, with a possible long-term play to compete against the likes of AWS and Stripe. In their own words this is being done to "End the FAANG monopoly".

[0] https://ir.tmtgcorp.com/company-presentation/

Theranos was going to have portable blood testing kits the size of an iPod. WeWork was going to build its own schools and neighborhoods.

It's all vaporware until proven otherwise.

It's a copycat venture with a distinguishing characteristic the existing players won't want or be able to compete with.

Yea, they still have to execute, but they're not exactly depending on any cutting edge technology or novel business plan to make it work.

Given John Malone’s recent overtures to Trump, it’s possible that this is a Liberty Media PIPE deal with the intent of adding Trump to Liberty’s channel lineup as a FOX/OANN competitor, which would be broadly consistent with their corporate strategy. Of course, this being Trump, it could also be a bunch of Russian oligarchs via private placement, so who the hell knows.

That’s a boatload of cash. Wonder why they need so much?

Look, coating an entire office in tacky gold leaf isn’t cheap.

Scrubbing references to Mastodon doesn't come cheap.

Hire Cyber Ninjas to use sed

Pending confirmation from a public agency, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to treat the $1 billion number with a large grain of salt. Donald Trump has a long history of exaggerating the value of his investments and assets, and the kind of opaque corporate structure described here lends itself nicely to that.

It's possible that contractors and lawyers are asking to be paid upfront.

deliberately regressive psyops disguised as patriotism comes at a premium

I think it has a high chance of being a decently successful venture. They have the money, the tech, and an incredibly passionate audience. It’d be difficult for it not to be successful in my view.

Wonder how much of this is domestic versus international investment.

if he wants to stop censorship he will have to create his own phone next considering iphone and androids are the app gate keepers. you really cant have an app on those phones without a rating system

There is no end to this kind of escalation short of forking the entire digital economy.

You have your own phone, now what? ISPs and card providers will be pressured to deny their services, banks to close accounts, antivirus companies to yank licences, antispam companies to blacklist domains, open source projects to create new licensing schemes that ban certain viewpoints. There are multiple points of failure along the way.

It'd be cheaper to pay off politicians to get rid of the ability for the gatekeepers to gatekeep.

And fuck it if this is what it takes to get rid of the gatekeepers I'm all for it.

A social media startup raising a billion dollars shouldn’t be on HN?

Another social media company is raising $1B from investors should not be on HN because?

So Clubhouse, Snap Inc, Pinterest, TikTok (ByteDance), Twitter and Facebook all have done the exact same thing and it was posted here on HN which was fine but it is not fine for this one?

Why not?

Every progressive with half a hand at hacking will try to be a hero to take this down. Mastodon is going to get some free penetration testing.

I don’t think that’s likely. The recurring theme with these right-catering sites seems to be “we put all of our user data on a public bucket,” at which point a Twitter rando tends to find them with a Shodan search or Google Dork. Which is the telling part: it’s infrastructural incompetence, not exploits in Mastodon or whatever software they choose to run.

> try to be a hero to take this down.

I'm pretty sure whoever is investing in this is heavily aware of that possibility.

Every anybody with a thimble of knowledge about "hacking" understands that you cannot "take this down" for more than a few days at a time.