I don't think the purpose here is to be the proverbial president of the US but to simply have a community of people who are willing to chip some money in and who want healthier discourse.

If you're going to blow up to the size of facebook you're just going to suffer from the very same problems. More diversity and more competition and more alternatives is what this is supposed to be part of. I think the point here is to build an ecosystem of saner social networks, not the next Franken-network.