Comment by colesantiago
1 day ago
When a project is funded by these VCs I question:
Why does it need VCs? Why not company and corporate sponsorship like Ladybird?
Why should we spend our time on a developer tool that would be enshittified down the line when VCs expect 10x returns?
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.
Sure Tailscale is an excellent one. For now at least. It is also not open source and also has a paid product.
Perhaps maybe in a few years time, Tangled Enterprise would be available to compete with GitHub Enterprise and that is where the switch over happens for companies who want to move over from GitHub to Tangled.
I don’t know because somehow Tangled would need to make money somehow?
I hope Tangled becomes profitable enough to withstand enshittification, because more and more funding rounds and not meeting targets means giving up control and facing a repeat of what happened at Bluesky.