Independent but then their coms are purely proprietary, US-based sludge. If you think folks should be contributing to your project, you should be using technology where you can where you & your contributors can patch & make better too. There is no good reason to be limited to only Microsoft Github & Discord.
Don’t get it wrong: I have followed for years & want the project to succeed, but this reliance on corporations & not giving your users a private option where they can control their data needs to stop. Normies have ignorance excuse but software makers do not as they generally know better about how these tech firms operate.