You seem far more unusual than me, to be honest. Setting up your own self-hosted servers and application protocols, no thanks!

Also, you can easily find out who they are as they have an "About Us" on their website which has a "Contact" link that goes to https://www.opendesktop.org/contact

Hive01 GmbH Am Speksel 10 33649 Bielefeld Germany Contact: contact@opendesktop.org

They are also on Wikipedia and seem to have been around since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org

There, you find out that this project was started by Frank Karlitschek and is heavily involved on the KDE project, which is widely known in the Linux community.

The reason you think they have no brand recognition is that they don't have the marketing of the big cos you know about like Google and Facebook... it doesn't mean they are no-ones that cannot be trusted as you seem to be implying.