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 startedLatest
Groups and topics, community rules and decision-making, events, organisation profiles, federated comments, custom themes: built with the communities who needed them, ready to use as-is, or to shape into a flavour of your community's own.
Read the article →1.0.5 introduces Archipelago mode: opt-in, allow-list federation for communities who want to choose exactly who they connect with, plus broadcast announcements, embeddable widgets, encrypted emails, faster search, and a lot of polish.
Since the 1.0 release of Bonfire Social, we've been heads-down listening to our our pilot communities, beta testers, and co-design partners. Version 1.0.3 is the result: a release focused on stability and polish, which fixes a wide range of bugs and brings meaningful usability improvements, especially around feeds, boundaries, and more advanced features.
We just released Bonfire 1.0.2, an update focused on giving you a more stable and reliable experience. We're also heads-down working with several communities who are setting up their own Bonfire servers in the coming months. Plus end to end encryption and federated groups development updates.
We're back with an update focused on making your social web experience livelier, more connected, and truly yours. Plus updates on the crowdfunding campaign and what's next.
Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse. They'll live next to your personal feed, but each group having a specific purpose: a study circle, a lab team, an activist collective, a local mutual aid crew, a project team. Inside you’ll find posts, conversations, calendars, shared resources, and more. Crucially, groups will be portable and interoperable.
Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that's a feature, not a bug. The project's very structure is about enabling a tapestry of social spaces, all built with shared building blocks but diverging in flavour, practice, and purpose. In this post we embrace the project's plurality and explore the many ways people describe and understand Bonfire.
Meet Adrian and Lee, two of the people helping shape Bonfire's future. They are gifting group administrators who've been on the frontlines of the Buy Nothing movement, building community, fostering generosity, and fighting against Facebook's enshittification every step of the way.
It was not an easy choice to focus our crowdfunding campaign on care and maintenance as the condition sine qua non to consider it successful.
We're releasing Bonfire Social 1.0 and launching a crowdfund so communities drive what we build next. Back it, share it, and help move the social web from closed platforms to open networks.
Bonfire’s latest release puts data portability (moving and taking your data with you) and anti-enshittification (avoiding manipulative platform tricks) front and center.
After a long stretch of co-design, development, and reflection, we’re excited to share the Bonfire Social 1.0 Release Candidate — a version ready for real-world testing and feedback before the official 1.0 release.
In a world of “move fast and break things,” we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.
We are thrilled to announce Mosaic, a venture by the Bonfire team designed to empower organizations by creating fully customized, federated digital spaces tailored to their unique needs.
Today, we'll go through the implementation of the main navigation patterns needed to traverse our app's sections and views.
With our initial mockups complete, we were eager to start coding in LiveView Native (LVN). There are two primary ways to debug our iOS app: using Xcode or LVN Go.
Welcome to the first post of our development diary for the Bonfire native app. In this series, we'll journey together through the entire process of designing and publishing Bonfire on the Apple App Store using LiveView Native.
This initiative aims to inspire developers to learn the stack and framework and to create Bonfire extensions, while helping to close some issues along the way.
Releasing the stable 1.0 version of the Bonfire federated social network requires collaboration with the communities, hackers, tinkerers, and sysadmins who plan to use it.
We’re excited to present the Open Science Network initiative, a first step towards open and federated digital spaces designed to push the boundaries of open science and scholarly communication.
To better understand the workflow involved in building Bonfire extension from scratch, we implemented a design pattern from the Prosocial Design Network: label misleading content; add links to reliable, related content.
We've spent the past two years building, iterating, experimenting, and refactoring the Bonfire codebase — to explore our assumptions, co-design with our community, and stretch the limits of social networking, all while having fun!
Notes about our latest user testing research to gather feedback and insights on the bonfire composer component.
As we approach v1.0 of Bonfire, we’re looking for volunteers to help us with some user research.
We are happy to announce that the next Bonfire release will introduce the capacity to define and assign custom roles.
As part of our commitment to empower communities with tools to foster coordination, we are thrilled to announce the development of federated groups in Bonfire.
"One does not need to set themselves on fire to keep other people warm."
In September we have been invited to present bonfire at the italian privacy week conference. This is the bonfire presentation translated in english.
How will our online experiences be different once we take back control over exactly who should see, interact with, and even collaborate on our content and activities at the most granular level?
Today, the Bonfire team is asking for *your* help with beta testing. Bonfire still needs a lot of work - be it bugs, federation, missing features, configurability and user experience - but that's the point, we decided to launch the playground at this gnarly stage with the specific intention of moving toward the 1.0 release as a community.
In a few days' time we'd like to invite you to experiment with a 'playground' instance of Bonfire, the federated social networking toolkit for communities. Lots of what you'll see in the Bonfire beta will be recognisable from other social and/or federated apps. There is some functionality that may be a little different with Bonfire as well.
We're now days away from the beta release of Bonfire, a federated app toolkit. When beta users get their hands on it, however, they might be confused wait, this looks like just another microblogging app! haven't we already got enough of those?
On May 10th we published a toot asking for volunteers to dive into our upcoming beta of Bonfire Social, by participating in some usability testing sessions.
One thing I’ve learned from spending all of my adult life online and being involved in lots of innovation projects is that you can have the best bookmarking system in the world, but it means nothing if you don’t do something with the stuff you’ve bookmarked...
One of the things about working openly is, fairly obviously, sharing your work as you go. This can be difficult for many reasons, not least because of the human tendency toward narrative, to completed stories with start, middle, and end...
One thing I’ve learned from spending all of my adult life online and being involved in lots of innovation projects is that you can have the best bookmarking system in the world, but it means nothing if you don’t do something with the stuff you’ve bookmarked...
We are pleased to announce that Bonfire has been awarded a grant from the Culture of Solidarity Fund to support cross-border cultural initiatives of solidarity in times of uncertainty and "infodemic".
As we’re approaching a new phase in which bonfire is not anymore a chimera among few devs, but it’s starting to come together as a nice tool, some of us are anxious to make raids in the analogic world and spread the big news...
Bonfire:UI:Social is an extension that includes the main User Interfaces (both assembled pages and single components) required to have a fully working federated social network app
Dopamine and attention manipulation are not inherent properties of a social network. It is time to reconsider some fundamental questions.
We are building a coordination tool that shares a lot of functionality with most to-do apps out there. But how is it different?
Our journey through brainstorming and creating the bonfire logotype
