Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it’s powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it’s designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more control over how the app functions, which features and defaults are in place, and what their own roadmap and priorities will include.
There’s a decidedly disruptive bent to the software, which describes itself as a place where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control.”
In other words, its mission is to build social software where people get to make the decisions, not big tech platform makers like Meta or Google.
The organization itself runs as a nonprofit funded by donations and grants, and it doesn’t take venture capital. Its code is open source, and it works in collaboration with the communities and researchers that use it to build and enhance online digital spaces.
Bonfire Social, now offered as a 1.0 Release Candidate ahead of the public release, is just one representation of what Bonfire offers. Bonfire calls it a “flavor.”
Each flavor is a preconfigured bundle of Bonfire extensions, features, and defaults, sort of like a starting template. When a community opts to run a particular “flavor,” it gets to govern the app as it sees fit, adding its own extensions and determining its own roadmap for product changes. This puts the social software back under users’ control, instead of being subject to the whims of a platform maker with an ever-changing feature sets and algorithms.
The organization is already developing other flavors like Bonfire Community and Open Science, and the Bonfire software lets any other community create their own version.
In Bonfire Social, users will recognize familiar features, like feeds and tools to follow users, share posts, create user profiles, flag or block content, and more.
However, it also offers other tools and features that traditional social networks may not have, like tools for customizing feeds, support for nested discussions, the ability to host multiple profiles per user, rich-text posts, and access control features.
Custom feeds are a key differentiation between Bonfire and traditional social media apps.
Though the idea of following custom feeds is something that’s been popularized by newer social networks like Bluesky or social browsers like Flipboard’s Surf, the tools to actually create those feeds are maintained by third parties. Bonfire instead offers its own custom feed-building tools in a simple interface that doesn’t require users to understand coding.
To build feeds, users can filter and sort content by type, date, engagement level, source instance, and more, including something it calls “circles.”
Those who lived through the Google+ era of social networks may be familiar with the concept of Circles. On Google’s social network, users organized contacts into groups, called Circles, for optimized sharing. That concept lives on at Bonfire, where a circle represents a list of people. That can be a group of friends, a fan group, local users, organizers at a mutual aid group, or anything else users can come up with. These circles are private by default but can be shared with others.
Another unique feature on Bonfire Social is Boundaries, which let you control who can see or engage with your content. For instance, you could share a post with a number of your circles, but only allow one specific circle’s members to comment.
Bonfire also supports threaded conversations (nested discussions) where replies can branch out into their own sub-threads. This can be useful for communities where deeper discussions and collaboration are more valuable than those where everyone competes for attention.
Plus, Bonfire users can customize the app using one of the 16 built-in themes, or they can design their own layout and pick their own colors and fonts.
Accounts on Bonfires can also host multiple profiles that have their own followers, content, and settings. This could be useful for those who simply prefer to have both public and private profiles, but also for those who need to share a given profile with others — like a profile for a business, a publication, a collective, or a project team.
Other features available at launch include PWA support for mobile devices, community blocklists, custom emoji support, full-text search (with opt out), direct messages, private group discussions (also with nested threads), and more. Extensions, which add different features, can be enabled or disabled by both admins and users. Admins simply decide what the defaults are.
That means users could turn on or off features they don’t like, even core features such as likes or boosts (the federated version of the retweet/repost).
Because Bonfire is built on ActivityPub, it also federates with Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, and others.
The software is meant to be self-installed, though work to develop a hosting network is under way. For those who just want to kick the tires, a demo instance is available.
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