Build Your Own Social Community | Bonfire

Introducing Bonfire Social: A New Approach to Community Building

Bonfire Social, a novel framework for establishing communities on the open social web, was unveiled on Thursday at the FediForum online conference. This federated application, powered by the ActivityPub protocol – the same foundation as Mastodon – distinguishes itself through its enhanced modularity and customization options.

Communities utilizing Bonfire possess greater autonomy over the application’s functionality, default settings, and future development priorities.

A Disruptive Vision for Social Networking

The software embodies a distinctly disruptive philosophy, positioning itself as a space where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control.”

Essentially, its core objective is to foster social software where users, rather than large technology corporations like Meta or Google, hold the decision-making power.

The organization operates as a nonprofit, sustained by donations and grants, deliberately avoiding venture capital funding. Its code is openly accessible, and it actively collaborates with the communities and researchers who utilize it to construct and refine online digital environments.

Bonfire Flavors: Customizable Experiences

Currently available as a 1.0 Release Candidate prior to its public launch, Bonfire Social represents just one iteration of what Bonfire offers – a “flavor,” as it’s termed.

Each flavor is a preconfigured package of Bonfire extensions, features, and defaults, functioning as a starting template. When a community chooses a specific flavor, it gains the ability to govern the application according to its needs, incorporating custom extensions and defining its own product roadmap.

This approach restores control of social software to users, shielding them from the fluctuating feature sets and algorithms imposed by traditional platform providers.

The organization is currently developing additional flavors, including Bonfire Community and Open Science, and the Bonfire software empowers any community to create its own customized version.

Familiar Features and Innovative Tools

Users of Bonfire Social will recognize common features such as feeds, the ability to follow users, share posts, create profiles, and flag or block content.

However, it also introduces tools and functionalities not typically found in conventional social networks, including customizable feeds, support for nested discussions, the capacity to host multiple profiles per user, rich-text posts, and granular access control features.

Custom Feeds and Circles

Custom feeds represent a significant differentiator between Bonfire and established social media platforms.

While the concept of following curated feeds has gained traction on platforms like Bluesky and through social browsers like Flipboard’s Surf, the tools for creating these feeds are generally maintained by external parties. Bonfire, conversely, provides its own integrated custom feed-building tools within a user-friendly interface, eliminating the need for coding expertise.

Users can construct feeds by filtering and sorting content based on type, date, engagement level, source instance, and “circles.” The “Circles” concept, reminiscent of Google+, allows users to organize contacts into groups for targeted sharing. These circles are private by default but can be shared as desired.

Boundaries and Threaded Conversations

Boundaries, another unique feature, enable users to control the visibility and engagement with their content. For example, a post can be shared with multiple circles, but comments restricted to members of a specific circle.

Bonfire also supports threaded conversations, allowing replies to branch into sub-threads. This is particularly beneficial for communities prioritizing in-depth discussions and collaboration over broad attention-seeking.

Customization and Multi-Profile Support

Users can personalize the app’s appearance with one of 16 built-in themes or create entirely custom layouts, selecting their preferred colors and fonts.

Furthermore, Bonfire accounts can host multiple profiles, each with its own followers, content, and settings. This is useful for individuals desiring separate public and private profiles, or for teams and organizations managing shared profiles.

Additional Features and Federation

Other features available at launch include Progressive Web App (PWA) support for mobile devices, community blocklists, custom emoji support, full-text search (with opt-out), direct messages, private group discussions (with nested threads), and more.

Extensions, which introduce additional functionalities, can be enabled or disabled by both administrators and users, with administrators setting the default configurations.

Users can even toggle core features, such as likes or boosts (the federated equivalent of retweets/reposts), on or off according to their preferences.

Built on ActivityPub, Bonfire seamlessly federates with Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, and other compatible platforms.

The software is designed for self-installation, although development of a hosted network is underway. A demo instance is available for those wishing to explore its capabilities.