I checked both their forums and both are very inactive compared to other alternate communities.
I posted a question there earlier today and had a response within a minute and many likes on the posts, so it can't be that inactive.
It's quite active. Have a look:
https://safenetforum.orgHere's the other topic on Bitcointalk about Maidsafe (the company) and SAFE (the project they are building)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=579797.2260Maidsafe (the company) is real and working for over 10 years on this project (SAFE) now. Their software called Alpha 1 is currently running on several hundreds of nodes
in a datacentre, but we had several testnest with Vaults from home. These Vaults is where the routing takes place. It will allow people to Farm (a bit like mining) Safecoin from home
when they deliver data to the network. We are waiting for Vaults again which got updated with the new routing. They have a group of professional paid programmers working on their project.
https://github.com/orgs/maidsafe/peopleMaidsafe is still looking to hire more engineers/devs. So yeah, this thing is definitely for real.
But like I said, there's already a topic about Maidsafe on BCT (see link above). And their forum is the best place to go for more info. You can try out their Alpha 1 project as well:
https://maidsafe.net/Have fun.