I feel you on this... their latest careers page announcement made me feel a little weird: https://fluxer.app/careers

Like... I'm hoping they're not gonna go full corpo and get VC money and try to IPO and all that stuff...

But, on the other hand: devs gotta eat, servers gotta get deployed. They do need money. If we want them to focus on building Fluxer, then they need to make some money so they don't have to work somewhere else. I originally tried out Stoat, but the main instance is so slow that I wasn't sure if I could recommend it to people. I understand why it's slow. It costs money to rent more powerful servers. I wish Stoat had more money.

Additionally, yeah, both Stoat and Fluxer are AGPLv3, which is good. Previously, Fluxer required signing a CLA, which is not great for building trust with the community. It would give Fluxer the ability to make the project non-free in the future. However, it seems like Fluxer has decided to remove their CLA! This should help limit the amount of damage they can do if they go evil.

Also, also. Fluxer is going to pursue federation. Which would again hopefully protect us a little from an evil Fluxer. Now sure, federation isn't here yet and maybe they could cancel it, but at least we got some interest in it. For Stoat, I believe last I heard they weren't interested in implementing federation. Not sure if this has changed.

tl;dr I also have some uncertain vibes from Fluxer, but so far their actions have been pretty positive, so... innocent until proven guilty? 🤷