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 partners with universities, scholarly networks and science communicators who run spaces of their own, co-design around real practice, and research how communities actually work, such as experimenting with new forms of governance and open knowledge exchange.
Our collaborations span living labs at Warwick, governance research with Princeton HCI and design experiments with the Prosocial Design Network, and together they shape the Open Science Network, a scholarly edition of Bonfire. The code, design patterns and methods we develop return to the commons, openly licensed.
Fellowship · Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Under the fellowship Participatory Design: A Living Lab for the Federated Research Commons, a Bonfire server at Warwick is where research infrastructure gets co-designed, with academics, students, librarians, data stewards and research software engineers at the same table.
Governance research · Human-Computer Interaction
Protocol-based research into community-governed platforms. Together we designed Bonfire's community rules, drawing on CrowCards. The underlying workshops with fediverse organisers were published at CHI 2026.
Safety research · The Bartlett
Participating in Preventing Online Violence in Digital Education Spaces, a UCL-led network on technology-facilitated harassment and abuse in digital learning. We're one of the partners in its scoping phase, helping shape the research and tools that come out of it.
Co-design
Researchers and activists who use their social presence to share findings and counter disinformation. They shaped the open-science work from the beginning and co-wrote the original proposal.
Research network
Behavioural scientists building infrastructure for crisis knowledge management: how knowledge gets made, integrated and argued over when it matters quickly. Ulrike Hahn co-authored the Open Science Network paper below.
Design research · ongoing
A network cataloguing evidence-based design patterns for healthier online spaces. We built one of their patterns, labelling misleading content with links to reliable sources, as a working Bonfire extension in a matter of hours, and we're continuing to work with them.
Running Bonfire · open evaluation · eLife
Sciety Discussions is a Bonfire server where researchers discuss preprints and their peer evaluations straight from a Sciety article page, with ORCID sign-in and discussions archived to Zenodo as citable, persistent objects. A pilot with early adopters, funded by NLnet.
Scholarly network
A network for researchers and knowledge creators across disciplines: discovering open-access scholarship and teaching materials, sharing work in the repository, and making interdisciplinary connections.
The Open Science Network
The Open Science Network is a ready-made set of building blocks, put together for research and governed by the researchers who use it, shaped with the scholarly organisations above. It's a starting point rather than a finished product: every community that takes it up reshapes it. Université de Lorraine and the Paris region digital university network (UNIF) are among the institutions lining up next. A university, a scholarly society, a lab or a collective can each run its own server, shaped to meet their needs, and stay connected to all the others.
Sign in with ORCID, Zenodo or your institution's own login. Publications, affiliations and research interests arrive from ORCID and OpenAlex rather than being retyped.
Posts and discussions can take DOIs and become citable FAIR objects, preserved as part of the scholarly record instead of lost in a private thread.
Each community runs its own server. Your data stays under your control, and you connect globally without giving up local governance.
Share a paper and watch it come alive: metadata, co-authors, datasets and related works. Colleagues join in from whatever platform they already use.
Add repository connectors, peer review workflows or research tools as your community finds it needs them.
Explore further
There's a great deal more of it than fits here, including pilot servers with your own branding and onboarding.
Co-design & research
“We're not just piloting a platform, we're piloting the process.”
Because it's modular the whole way down, an intervention can ship as an extension and run on a live server without forking the app, in hours rather than months. A collaboration can take whatever shape suits: a grant, a consortium, a fellowship, or our co-design programme Mosaic.
Governance, moderation and decision processes are all explicit and adjustable, in real communities rather than lab conditions. You can change the thing you're studying, not only observe it, and because servers federate you can study how communities behave across institutions. For example: CrowCards, designed with Princeton for documenting how a community governs itself.
Whatever we build together is free software under the AGPL: yours to run and fork long after the funding ends, and everyone else's to build on. What one community funds, every community inherits.
What researchers say
“Science needs digital infrastructure for scientific discourse that is scholar-owned and scholar-led. Only with that can the full potential of open science be fulfilled.”
“The Open Science Network advances beyond traditional journals by providing federated, community-governed platforms tailored for scientific collaboration.”
“Integrating open science principles and tools into the Fediverse, Bonfire is poised to reshape public research for the common good.”
“I strongly encourage research organisations to adopt it and embrace the future of open, interoperable research partnerships.”
Given to the Open Science Network, where there are more of them.
Writing & talks
Papers, abstracts and articles, written by collaborators or independent observers.
Saturno, Minutillo, de Borniol, Boudes, Fressengeas & Hahn · EGU General Assembly · 2026
“Platforms that prioritize engagement over accuracy cannot facilitate reliable scientific communication.”
“Using open protocols is the best way to enable scientific communication that both peers and the general public can trust.”
Asta von Schröder · winoda.de · 2026
“[Platforms like Twitter] can hold personal networks hostage at any time and change the rules of the game.”
“The vision is a digital network of researchers—free of advertising and algorithms—that instead provides optimal support for the community's very specific needs.”
Mark Williams · Sciety · 2025
How Sciety connects preprint discussions to its Bonfire-powered space, letting scholarly conversations travel across ActivityPub and the wider decentralised web.
Niboe, Layla Axul (UNAM), Bonfire · The original Open Science Network proposal · 2023
“We envision these implementations being crafted in the open, through a co-designing process that unites scientists, researchers, and activists.”
Free software, no investors, no ads, no lock-in. How co-design works.
