Explore what your community could build.
FeaturesBUILD Building blocks your community can combine. Comparison tableCOMPARE How Bonfire differs from other community platforms. Case studiesSTORIES How communities are shaping Bonfire for their needs. About BonfireABOUT The project, principles, and people behind it. Try Bonfire at the campground ↗ Launch your BonfireChoose how much you want to run yourself.
Self-hostDIY Your infrastructure and some sysadmin comfort. Cooperative hostingHOST Your own space without a sysadmin job. Co-design with usWITH For communities, organisations and funders with specific needs. Compare all three routes → EcosystemFind people, answers, and tools around Bonfire.
ParticipateJOIN Contribute, collaborate, or help sustain the commons. FAQsASK Licensing, federation, privacy, and governance. DocumentationDOCS Setup guides and technical reference for hosts and builders. Browse the source code ↗ Blog Get startedBuilding open digital spaces for the commons.
We strive for a world where all living beings thrive and communities decide their own futures, free from corporate greed and state domination.
The mission
Since 2020, Bonfire has been building free software for communities to create their own digital spaces: be it to coordinate as peers, make decisions together, act on them, or just hang out. Because everything in Bonfire is built on open standards, every space can interconnect with thousands of federated apps across the web.
At Bonfire we work to nurture digital spaces that are full of life, and encourage cooperation that gets things done. This is possible through spaces that are inclusive, safe and democratic by design. This is only achievable when tools are flexible enough to adapt to each community's way of thinking and working, and by empowering each group to govern their own spaces so everything is decided by those that are impacted the most, rather than imposed from outside.
A different path
Most of the alternatives pull the wrong way. Big Tech centralises social life for profit; blockchain projects prize individual sovereignty over solidarity. Even Bluesky throws everyone into a single mythical "global town square" rather than a federation of self-governing communities. Each leaves collective care and real community needs behind, turning social life into products that use, abuse, and extract from us.
Bonfire puts communities first: autonomy, mutual care, and collective power. Each community holds its own space and chooses who to connect with, federating only with communities it trusts (in archipelago mode). We're glad others like Blacksky bring community and safety to their networks too, and we bridge to them across the open social web.
How we're organised
For communities, by communities.
Bonfire Networks is a not-for-profit collective funded by donations and grants, not by private investors or venture capital. Our finances are transparently managed through our Open Collective account.
The only way to address a community's real needs is for the people who use the tools to design them. That's how Bonfire started: we wanted to build tools that met our own needs and those of our friends, families and allies. And how we co-design with other communities is no different: we work together to co-create the kind of digital spaces they actually need, and give them the keys to customise and evolve them further. That frees us to design for the diverse needs of living and breathing communities, not for some mass-market average user. We build in solidarity with communities, not for them.
We welcome feedback and collaboration with communities, researchers, and activists to create thoughtful features and build more caring digital spaces. All Bonfire code is open source, licensed under AGPL3, which means all features or improvements can benefit the whole ecosystem.
The people
Meet the builders of Bonfire.
We're a small crew of maintainers and contributors, who organise using consent-based sociocratic models to coordinate tasks and make decisions among us. If you are interested in actively participating in our collective and pushing Bonfire forward we invite you to abide by our code of conduct and get involved!
Maintainers circle
