Bonfire Social: Empowering Communities to Reclaim the Open Web

In an era dominated by centralized social media giants, a new player is emerging with a decidedly different philosophy. Bonfire Social, a framework designed for building communities on the open social web, recently launched its 1.0 Release Candidate during the FediForum online conference. While it shares the same underlying protocol, ActivityPub, as platforms like Mastodon, Bonfire is engineered with a focus on modularity and deep customization, aiming to put control firmly back into the hands of the communities that use it.

The mission statement of Bonfire Social is bold and ambitious, envisioning a digital space where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control.” This ethos directly challenges the prevailing model of social platforms driven by advertising revenue and algorithmic manipulation, positioning Bonfire as a disruptive force in the social media landscape.

At its core, Bonfire is about decentralization and user agency. It seeks to provide the tools necessary for people, not corporations, to make decisions about how their online social spaces function. The organization behind Bonfire operates as a nonprofit, relying on donations and grants rather than venture capital. Its code is open source, fostering a collaborative environment where communities and researchers can contribute to the platform's development and enhancement.

Modularity and the Concept of 'Flavors'

Bonfire Social, as it exists today in its 1.0 Release Candidate form, is presented as just one possible “flavor” of the broader Bonfire framework. This concept of flavors is central to Bonfire's modular design. A flavor is essentially a preconfigured bundle of Bonfire extensions, features, and default settings, serving as a starting template for a community.

When a community chooses to run a specific flavor, they gain the power to govern their instance of the application. This includes the ability to add their own extensions, modify existing features, and determine their own roadmap for future product changes. This stands in stark contrast to traditional social networks, where users and communities are subject to the often-unilateral decisions of the platform owner regarding feature sets, algorithms, and policies.

The Bonfire organization is actively developing other flavors, such as Bonfire Community and Open Science, demonstrating the framework's flexibility. Crucially, the Bonfire software is designed to allow any community to create and manage its own unique version, tailored precisely to its specific needs and governance preferences.

Familiar Features, Elevated Control

While Bonfire Social introduces novel concepts, it also incorporates many features familiar to users of mainstream social networks and other platforms within the fediverse. Users will find standard functionalities like activity feeds, the ability to follow other users, tools for sharing posts, creating detailed user profiles, and mechanisms for flagging or blocking content. These foundational elements ensure a degree of familiarity, easing the transition for users accustomed to traditional social media.

However, Bonfire Social goes beyond the basics, offering a suite of advanced tools designed to give users unprecedented control over their social experience. These include sophisticated tools for customizing feeds, support for nested discussions, the capacity to host multiple profiles under a single user account, rich-text post formatting, and granular access control features.

Customizable Feeds: Beyond Algorithmic Control

One of the most significant differentiators for Bonfire Social is its approach to custom feeds. While the idea of curating one's feed has gained traction on newer platforms like Bluesky or through services like Flipboard's Surf, the tools for creating these feeds are often managed by third parties or require technical expertise.

Bonfire Social integrates its own custom feed-building tools directly into a user-friendly interface. This means users don't need to understand complex coding or rely on external services to tailor their content streams. The tools allow users to filter and sort content based on a variety of criteria, including content type, publication date, engagement level, the source instance within the fediverse, and a unique feature called “circles.”

Circles and Boundaries: Granular Control Over Your Audience

The concept of “Circles” in Bonfire Social might ring a bell for those who remember the Google+ era of social networking. On Google's platform, Circles allowed users to organize their contacts into distinct groups for more targeted sharing. Bonfire revives and enhances this idea, where a circle represents a user-defined list of people. These lists can be incredibly flexible, encompassing anything from close friends and family to members of a fan group, local community members, or collaborators on a specific project. By default, these circles are private, but users have the option to share them with others, facilitating community organization and interaction.

Building upon the concept of Circles, Bonfire Social introduces “Boundaries.” This feature provides users with fine-grained control over who can see or interact with their content. For example, a user could share a post with several of their defined circles but restrict commenting privileges to members of only one specific circle. This level of control over audience and engagement is a powerful tool for managing online interactions and fostering different types of discussions within a community.

Nested Discussions and Rich Content

Another feature that caters to communities prioritizing in-depth interaction is Bonfire's support for threaded conversations, also known as nested discussions. Unlike the flat reply structures common on many platforms, replies in Bonfire can branch out into their own sub-threads. This hierarchical structure makes it easier to follow specific conversational tangents and can be particularly valuable for communities engaged in detailed discussions, collaborative projects, or educational exchanges, where clarity and organization are paramount over the rapid-fire, attention-seeking dynamics often found elsewhere.

Beyond discussion structure, Bonfire also supports rich-text posts, allowing for more expressive and formatted content compared to the plain text or limited markdown options on many other social platforms. This is beneficial for sharing longer articles, reports, or structured information within a community.

Multiple Profiles and Extensive Customization

A particularly useful feature for many users is the ability to host multiple profiles under a single Bonfire account. Each profile can have its own set of followers, content stream, and settings. This flexibility is valuable for individuals who wish to maintain distinct public and private online identities. It's also incredibly practical for groups, organizations, or projects that need a shared online presence. A business, a publication, a collective, or a project team can manage a dedicated profile collaboratively, separating its online activity from the personal profiles of its members.

Beyond content and profile management, Bonfire users can personalize the look and feel of their interface extensively. The platform offers 16 built-in themes, providing a range of visual styles. For those who want even more control, the software allows users to design their own layouts and select their preferred colors and fonts, ensuring that each community instance can have a unique visual identity.

Beyond the Basics: Extensions and Federation

Bonfire's modularity extends to its feature set through the use of extensions. These extensions add different functionalities to the platform and can be enabled or disabled by both administrators and individual users. While administrators set the default configuration for a community instance, users retain the power to tailor their personal experience by turning features on or off based on their preferences. This includes the ability to disable even core social features like “likes” or “boosts” (the federated equivalent of retweets or reposts), allowing communities to define their own norms of interaction and engagement.

As an ActivityPub-based platform, Bonfire is inherently part of the fediverse. This means that Bonfire instances can federate, or communicate and share content, with other platforms that support the ActivityPub protocol. This includes popular platforms like Mastodon, as well as PeerTube (for video), Mobilizon (for events), and many others. This interoperability is a key advantage of the fediverse model, allowing users on different platforms to connect and interact without being confined to a single, monolithic network.

Other features available at launch include Progressive Web App (PWA) support for a better mobile experience, community blocklists for moderation, custom emoji support to enhance community identity, full-text search (with an opt-out option for privacy), direct messaging for private conversations, and private group discussions that also support nested threads.

Installation and the Future of Hosting

Currently, the Bonfire software is primarily designed for self-installation. This means that communities or individuals who wish to run a Bonfire instance need the technical capacity to set up and manage their own server. While this provides maximum control, it can be a barrier for less technical users or smaller communities.

Recognizing this, the Bonfire organization is actively working to develop a hosting network. The goal is to make it easier for communities to get started with Bonfire without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure themselves. This planned hosting solution will be crucial for broader adoption and making the platform accessible to a wider range of groups.

For those interested in exploring Bonfire's capabilities before committing to an installation, a demo instance called Campground is available. This allows potential users and community organizers to “kick the tires” and experience the features and interface firsthand.

Bonfire's Place in the Open Social Web Movement

Bonfire Social enters the landscape of the open social web at a time when dissatisfaction with centralized platforms is high. Concerns over data privacy, algorithmic control, content moderation policies, and the influence of corporate interests have driven many users and communities to seek alternatives.

The fediverse, powered by protocols like ActivityPub, represents a significant step towards a more decentralized and user-centric online social environment. Platforms like Mastodon have demonstrated the viability of this model, offering users more control over their data and interactions compared to platforms like Twitter or Facebook.

Bonfire Social builds upon this foundation but pushes the concept of user and community control even further through its modular architecture and extensive customization options. By allowing communities to define their own rules, features, and even the look and feel of their platform instance, Bonfire empowers them to create digital spaces that truly reflect their values and needs, rather than conforming to a one-size-fits-all model dictated by a corporation.

The “flavors” approach is particularly innovative, enabling diverse communities – from hobbyist groups and local organizers to scientific collaborations and activist networks – to select or build a version of Bonfire that is perfectly suited to their specific purpose. A scientific community might prioritize features for sharing research and conducting structured discussions (like nested threads), while a local community group might focus on tools for organizing events and sharing local news (perhaps through specific extensions).

The nonprofit structure and open-source nature of Bonfire further reinforce its commitment to being free from the pressures of private interest and capitalistic control. This model prioritizes the health and flourishing of communities over maximizing profit or engagement metrics driven by advertising.

While self-hosting currently requires some technical skill, the development of a hosting network signals a clear path towards making Bonfire accessible to a broader audience. Lowering the barrier to entry for running a community instance is crucial for the widespread adoption of decentralized platforms.

Bonfire Social represents a compelling vision for the future of online communities. It's not just another social network; it's a toolkit for building bespoke, user-governed social spaces that can interoperate with the wider fediverse. By emphasizing modularity, customization, and community control, Bonfire aims to provide a robust and flexible alternative to the centralized platforms that currently dominate the digital social landscape, offering a path towards a more democratic and diverse open social web.