Matters of care - why maintenance comes first
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.
Articles tagged posts
Bonfire Social 1.0 is here, back the community‑funded roadmap
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 Social 1.0rc3
Bonfire’s latest release puts data portability (moving and taking your data with you) and anti-enshittification (avoiding manipulative platform tricks) front and center.
Exploring a Bonfire Geosocial Extension
Overview This issue explores implementing a basic geosocial extension for Bonfire that enables location-based social interactions without the privacy concerns, gamification and corporate overhead of foursquare. \ Relevant resources --------...
Connect your existing tools to the fediverse with Mosaic
Your organisation's favorite apps, now with superpowers. We all navigate a constellation of specialized tools daily. Organisations depend on CRMs, project management platforms, and financial systems. Communities coordinate through forum...
🔥 Bonfire Social 1.0 RC2
We’re pleased to announce Bonfire Social 1.0 Release Candidate 2! This update is all about refining and polishing the experience, fixing bugs, and making Bonfire more enjoyable and reliable for everyone. These improvements come directly fro...
Long-form content in Bonfire: Part 1
Inspired by @evan@cosocial.ca 's recent article on advancing long-form text in the social web, we've taken the leap and developed our first prototype for publishing and reading articles on Bonfire, based on the FEP-b2b8 draft specif...
Announcing the Bonfire Social 1.0 Release Candidate
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.
🐌 Slow Software for a Burning World 🔥
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.
Introducing Mosaic - Partner with the Bonfire Team to Create Your Own Federated Digital Space
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.
Understanding Navigation in LiveView Native
Today, we'll go through the implementation of the main navigation patterns needed to traverse our app's sections and views.
Prototyping Our First Native Components with LiveView Native
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.
Building Bonfire Native Apps with LiveView Native
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.
Bonfire Expeditions - Camp! A bounty programme
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.
Bonfire Expeditions - Collaborating to Release Version 1.0
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.
Open source meets open science - announcing the Open Science Network initiative
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.
Safer social networking - Bonfire's recent experiment with Prosocial Design Patterns
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.
The Road to Bonfire 1.0
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!
Making things intuitive is complex! Or, what we discovered via user testing
Notes about our latest user testing research to gather feedback and insights on the bonfire composer component.
Could you help us with user research?
As we approach v1.0 of Bonfire, we’re looking for volunteers to help us with some user research.
Empowering Bonfire users with advanced roles & permissions
We are happy to announce that the next Bonfire release will introduce the capacity to define and assign custom roles.
Dev Diary: Implementing federated groups in Bonfire
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.
How to use boundaries, circles and roles
"One does not need to set themselves on fire to keep other people warm."
Bonfire presentation @ PrivacyWeek
In September we have been invited to present bonfire at the italian privacy week conference. This is the bonfire presentation translated in english.
Introducing circles and boundaries
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?
Meet us at the playground: Bonfire Social beta launch
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.
What you can expect from the Bonfire beta
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.
Not Just 'Yet Another Microblog'
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?
Notes on our first usability testing round
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.
First version of report published sharing findings from Zappa project user research
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...
Some interesting findings from user research for the Zappa project (so far!)
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...
Countering misinformation in federated social networks, an introduction to the Zappa project
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...
Announcing the Zappa project
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".
Notes on the first neapolitan meeting
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...
A UI toolbox for customizable social network apps
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
Let a thousand bonfires bloom
Dopamine and attention manipulation are not inherent properties of a social network. It is time to reconsider some fundamental questions.
First steps toward federated project coordination
We are building a coordination tool that shares a lot of functionality with most to-do apps out there. But how is it different?
The story of Bonfire's visual identity
Our journey through brainstorming and creating the bonfire logotype
