Seems a little buggy but idgaf this is a thousand times better than the last attempt at a foss Xitter app
While this app seems sensible, I checked out the github developer account DimensionDev and it looks like their primary product is something called Mask which is something about “Web 3” crypto/NFT integration … looks like they’re a libertarian crypto grifter cult to me. They also have a gaudy, nonfunctional company page whose copyright notice reveals that is owned by a Chinese parent company with it’s own stale, uninformative web page.
It’s open source, and yeah, maybe they thought they’d make something actually useful … but the source is full of red flags.
Hi, I’m the developer of Flare. It’s really nice to see Flare being discussed here, so I’d like to share a bit of background on where it comes from and how I think about it.
The short version: Flare is the app I always hoped Twidere X could become.
I used to contribute to Twidere and later led development on Twidere X. Both of them were projects I was very proud of. Eventually, the company I worked for (which aquired Twidere) at that time decided to reallocate people to other products, so Twidere and Twidere X were discontinued. I didn’t really have a say in that decision, but I accepted it and moved on.
Later, inside the company, there was another internal social project (this was not Flare). I was very excited about it and spent a lot of time pushing it forward, but over time the direction of that project moved away from what I personally wanted to build, so I gradually stepped back.
Around that time I started experimenting with a “spiritual successor” to Twidere X as a personal project (this repo: https://github.com/Tlaster/WeiPo). When I realised this could create a conflict with my employment agreement, I decided to stop working on it to avoid any issues.
Shortly after that, the company needed a small experimental demo for passkey login on Mastodon. That prototype became the starting point of Flare, if you look at the very early commits you can still see traces of the passkey experiment, even though passkey login never actually shipped. After the demo phase ended, I kept working on Flare because I really wanted this kind of client to exist, and the company allowed it to live on as an open-source project under the DimensionDev organisation.
Right now, Flare’s design / development / maintenance / community are basically a one-person effort. The Flare accounts on different social platforms, plus the Discord/Telegram, are all run by me. For a while, a Flutter developer helped with the iOS version, but he later stepped away.
I understand why people are cautious when they see the connection to Mask Network. My personal focus with Flare is on social network features, not on crypto/Web3. I don’t have any work in progress in that area, and if that ever changes I would treat it as a separate, clearly opt-in integration. My goal for Flare is to be a good client for social network.
Mask Network has supported parts of the Fediverse for quite a while, for example sponsoring Mastodon and Misskey, and running instances like mstdn.jp. Those platforms did not suddenly “turn bad” because of that sponsorship. The early development of the official Mastodon iOS client also got help from Mask Network (the developer literally sat across from me in the office, he is a really nice guy).
Flare itself is fully open source under AGPLv3. If you or anyone else has concerns, you are very welcome to audit the code. I’m happy to answer technical questions in as much detail as I can.
