Hey! Love the idea. I think a lot of skepticism here would be addressed if you discussed your plans to monetize. People just want to know how you will (eventually) make money in a way that is aligned with how they expect this to evolve.

In the latest FOSS project I’m starting, I’m not avoiding all “open core” supposedly FOSS projects. In my experience, they’re the projects most likely to do a rug pull and change licenses. If they cannot commit to their entire project being free and open, they are less likely to actually be committed to the principles of free and open software.

While I was quite excited about some of the ideas being discussed in this project, it being VC backed is a complete non starter for me. Your claims of being built in the open don’t make me feel any better, you will eventually need to make returns for investors.

How can they ever see a dollar of profit without a rug pull, license change or hosted moat? This is a neat idea - besides just replacing github, a network of loosely-federated git servers seems like a promising base for distributed social media or chat platform someday - but it seems like the only way it can really stay open is if you're planning to stiff your investors.

How much work are you putting into simplicity? In my experience, in order for software to be permanent it needs to be like mold: only a single spore is required to grow a massive fruiting body and the spores themselves are very small and very uncomplicated. In this case, a spore is a single developer, and the simplicity is a low skill ceiling. Reproducibility does not benefit longetivity if the preconditions themselves themselves are highly complicated, and the benefit of simple bootstrapping is easily overshadowed if the software itself isn't friendly to being extensively hacked on by the average programmer.

What does your investor expect as far as returns, and how are they going to get it?

I don't say you specifically have bad intentions or that VC money is all evil.

But now you need to grow fast, which greatly increases the risk for me as your potential user, so you should at the very least write a post to make sure you're aligned with your users not just with your angels.

How are you going to use the money? What's the business model? How do you ensure you're around in 10+ years? How are you going to please your overlords with that business model and what will you do if they force you to squeeze more money out of the business?

I hope you succeed, because the competition is good for users, but VC-founding is a liability not a strength.

Mmmm still rather not support this.

I prefer slow and steady wins the race kind of project. Good luck!

VC money is absolutely not a means to an end, what is signals is that the company doesn't care about community and only cares about profit.

I'm with the OP you're replying to. Taking VC is an albatross that means a large portion of devs will never trust you or use your services (outside of bleeding your funds dry).

If this place truly cared about community they should have made a non-profit or some type of NGO, basically anything with a true community governance model. Not the current model of caring about money over a community.

We currently live in a society that solely cares about money and seriously doubt devs want to continue uplifting the current system that only benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else.

How many board seats does the company plan on giving to the community to ensure enshittification doesn't occur?

Would you be open to sharing a version of your pitch deck? The main question in my mind is what kind of exit the VCs have in mind when they give you this money.

Is the code base AI slop? You've published your code as open source, but without an explicit AI policy.

The most valuable thing Tangled will ever do is establish the protocol of Tangled. Once that’s done, it lives as long as people are willing to run it.

I don't think that will work. How many of us did contribute a simple patch to LibreOffice, Firefox, or GNOME?

At least this statement doesn't hold for LibreOffice. Their Online version, including "simple" HTML/CSS components, was archived because of a lack of maintainers. For their main project, the vast majority of contributions in the last release were made by former ecosystem partners (Collabora) or TDF staff. Volunteers only did a fraction of the work [1].

[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/L...

its one of the most complex htmx projects i have seen. super cool.

This website is funded by providing brainwashing services for YC's agenda.

Why?

In this case the VC in question is funding various atproto projects as they are one of the primary backing VCs for Bluesky.

So even if they don't expect returns from a given atproto project, they are investing money (and therefore funding FTEs) in the ecosystem at large.

The investment isn't necessarily in any one of these projects in isolation. It's in the AT protocol at large.

> Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird?

You talk about corporate sponsorship like that's trivial to find. Trust me when I say we spent over half a year chasing down grants/sponsorships only to be met with closed doors, extremely long wait times for pennies. We'd also be required to keep our day jobs—which means less focus on Tangled dev, and ultimately very slow progress overall.

We debated VC heavily (we're both idealists after all), but figured we can make it work—it's ultimately the founders that make bad calls leading to enshittification. There's plenty of examples of VC-backed companies that haven't enshittified. Tailscale is an excellent one, and hence we brought on Avery as an angel in our round.