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 startedBonfire/Set up & host/Cooperative Hosting Network
Cooperative Hosting Network.
Your community keeps control of its Bonfire space. Cooperative partners handle the servers, setup, and technical support.
Why cooperative hosting
Own your community's space. Share the infrastructure.
You shouldn't have to become a sysadmin to own your community's spacem, or to rely on a Big Tech landlord. Self-hosting can offer autonomy, but going it alone often means relying on the same giant cloud providers, with every small instance duplicating infrastructure and energy use.
What matters is who governs the infrastructure, not simply where the machines sit. Cooperative hosting offers a third path: shared, community-owned infrastructure operated for mutual benefit.
The Cooperative Hosting Network is an open invitation to build that path together: a sustainable, resilient ecosystem for Bonfire hosting, development, and technical support.
Hosting partners
Get hosted today, or help build the network.
While the wider cooperative network is still taking shape, partners in the cooperative ecosystem already run Bonfire instances. It's a joint effort with Co-op Cloud and CoQuest, with more co-ops and providers in conversation, and we're looking for others to join.
The model
We're looking for more participants to join in building a sustainable and resilient cooperative hosting ecosystem in the face of digital landscapes dominated by profit-driven giants. Our model, inspired by Open Cooperative Ecosystems and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), treats the software, the infrastructure it runs on, and the communities that use it as parts of one system that sustains itself. We see it as a way to keep not-for-profit free software projects alive, while avoiding the traps of SaaS (software as a service) or other models.
Such a cooperative alliance brings together many kinds of people, all pitching in: users, communities, moderators, tech supporters, infrastructure operators, translators, designers, developers, and more. Participation and contribution can come in various forms: financial support, resource sharing, labour, and active participation in decision-making and project upkeep.
This approach based on solidarity and mutual aid would ensure resiliency, accessibility and diversity, while promoting open community involvement. It puts trust, transparency, and people's control over their own tools back at the heart of how the software gets made.
The Cooperative Hosting Network would greatly simplify the setup, hosting, and operation of a Bonfire instance through an automated install wizard and dashboard, which would act as a gateway to an ecosystem of developers, designers, hosting providers, and other relevant services, which would work together to provide users and communities with:
The dashboard would also double as a decentralized economic network, transparently recording every contribution and distributing funds based on value equations democratically defined by the ecosystem stakeholders.
