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 from your feedback, bug reports, and real-world testing.

Of course, we couldn’t help ourselves and also snuck in some exciting new features—like long-form article publishing and more feeds customisations, plus plenty of interface refinements for both desktop and mobile.

A huge thank you to everyone who has set up a Bonfire instance, or joined the campground (our local-only testing space) to try out the app. Your suggestions and bug reports have been invaluable as we approach version 1.0. Please keep testing, sharing feedback, and helping us shape the future of federated social spaces!

✨ What’s new and improved?

• Long-form publishing: Going beyond beyond short posts to read and write in-depth articles, ideal for essays, announcements, or detailed content. Article feeds are now available for RSS readers.
• Smarter feeds: New feed options for events, books, and articles help you discover what matters to you most. You can now also filter out your own activities from your feeds when desired.
• Multi-profiles overview: A new navigation menu can display all your profiles with notification indicators, allowing quick profile switching.
• Private by default: New Bonfire instances start as invite-only, giving admins control over membership from day one.
• Interface improvements: We've refined the user experience, enhanced notifications and ensured posts display properly across mobile devices.
• More reliable: Tons of fixes for authentication, media uploads, mentions, moderation, and other core features.

Additional improvements include:

• Better translation and localization workflow
• Smoother OAuth/OpenID login and SSO support
• Updated documentation and guides for admins and contributors
• Enhanced S3 integration for uploads
• Lots of small bug fixes on comment threads, messaging, settings, and more

For a comprehensive list of changes, see the full changelog.

🎪 Community contributions and other initiatives

• We hosted our first install party using coop-cloud, with all participants who followed along successfully deploying their own Bonfire instances.
• Seperately, ozoned from Fireside Fedi livestreamed their installation attempt, surfacing valuable setup challenges. This highlighted the need to simplify Docker deployment and improve documentation. Contributors are welcome to help make this easier!
• Sciety deployed a Bonfire instance as part of their pre-print review project.
• @spark464@spark.box464.social published an article on how to add a weather widget in Bonfire.

🌍 Localisation: Bonfire in your language!

Bonfire Social is built to be diverse and welcoming, which means making it accessible in as many languages as possible. Thanks to our amazing translators, Bonfire is now available in several languages.

🏅 Top translated languages

- Portuguese (Brazil): 100% translated & reviewed 🎉

- French: 98.9% translated, 69.4% reviewed

- Italian: 96.7% translated, 54% reviewed

- German: 98% translated

- Spanish: 57% translated

- Vietnamese: 20.9% translated, 11.1% reviewed

- ...and several more, including Catalan, Cantonese and Taiwanese.

Want to help Bonfire speak your language? Please join us and make a difference for communities worldwide!

🤝 Help needed

As we push toward 1.0, we're facing some specific challenges where community support and contributions would make a real difference:

• DevOps expertise: We need help streamlining the Docker installation process to make Bonfire more accessible to new users. If you have experience with containerisation and deployment workflows, your contributions would be invaluable.
• Elixir developers: Join us in improving Bonfire's stability and performance. We're focused on eliminating bugs and enhancing the core extensions' reliability.
• Financial support: As a small team of two working full-time on Bonfire, we need community support to sustain development. You can contribute through our Open Collective page.
• Federation testing: We're seeking users willing to set up Bonfire instances and try out federation and interoperability with other fediverse platforms. Your real-world testing helps ensure Bonfire works seamlessly across the fediverse.
• Translation: Please join us or share this with your multilingual friends!

These are our most pressing needs as we approach 1.0. If you can help with any of these areas, please get in touch via the fediverse, Matrix chat, or GitHub. Every contribution, big or small, helps make Bonfire better for everyone.

🙏 Thank you!

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed translations and reviews. You are lighting up Bonfire for people everywhere! Here are some of our awesome translators:

> Gilles Dutilh, Ahmad Dakhlallah, Lamparina Coletivo, alan ptm, Antonio Irre, Zulfikar A, CDN, cranio_is_thinking, Steven Bond, Diego KehrleSousa, Vrlo Vazno, Ed, Andrei Guliaikin, Hendra Wahyu T, Hippie Gschpängschtli, House of Olivier EU, Ivan Minutillo, Juan García, Lapineige, Pascal Schmid, Martin Frost, Duy, Mayel de Borniol, Sovversivo Anonimo, Peter Kvillegård, Poesty Li, Sergio Guidoux, Vaclovas lntas, Williams Melgar, and many more!

We really appreciate your work! 💜

And a massive thank you to everyone who contributed code, ideas, testing, translations, and support—including @spark464@spark.box464.social , @tommi@pan.rent, @lechindianer@sueden.social , @fishinthecalculator@bonfire.fishinthecalculator.me , @dumpsterqueer@gts.superseriousbusiness.org , @ozoned@social.ozoned.net.

Thanks to those that are taking time to test drive Bonfire on our demo instance and provide feedback, such as @LiquidParasyte, @Rincewind, @youronlyone, @coyote...

Thanks to @nlnet@social.nlnet.nl for supporting the Bonfire development, all our Open Collective donors and our amazing community as a whole.

Bonfire is a collaborative project, and we’re grateful to build it with you .

---

Ready to try Bonfire 1.0 RC2?

- Get started

- Try our demo instance

- Provide feedback

- Chat with us on the fediverse: @Bonfire@bonfire.cafe

- Chat with us on Matrix

Let’s light up the fediverse together! 🚀

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 specification.

Beyond microblogging

From day one, we've designed Bonfire to break free from the constraints of microblogging-centric social networks. We've already experimented with extensions for coordinating tasks, exchanging resources, and more. As we work on Bonfire Social 1.0, adding article support felt like a natural evolution of this vision.

Working based on a FEP (fediverse enhancement proposal) that provided both design guidelines and technical specifications was refreshing and showed how co-design and shared standards can be our strongest ally for pushing the fediverse forward.

One feed, many content types

Adding articles marks a small but significant step towards realising the vision of the open social web: a digital space where you can receive, read and interact with diverse content types from a single place, rather than juggling multiple platforms, accounts, and notification streams.

With Bonfire, articles from writefreely, ghosts, wordpress and any other federated platforms that implement the FEP-b2b8, now appear seamlessly in your feed alongside other content from your network. You can:

- Preview articles in the feed

- Read the full article and nested comments without loading an external site (just like the good old days of RSS readers)

- React or reply to the article or other comments

This UX improvement offers a glimpse of what becomes possible as more platforms and software embrace the fediverse.

But why stop there?

Thanks to our modular feed builder, we've added an "Articles" feed preset. This dedicated timeline displays only long-form content, with sorting options for most liked, most replied, and more.

It's like having a decentralised blogging platform and feed reader integrated in your social network.

Speaking of feed readers, we've also added RSS and Atom feeds so you can subscribe to Bonfire feeds (including articles and/or microposts) via your favourite feed reader app as well.

And yes, you can also write articles directly in Bonfire! While the authoring experience is still rough around the edges (we're actively improving the UX), we're pleased with this initial prototype (which includes a simple rich text editor using markdown, and the option to add a title and cover image). In fact, this very article was written and published through Bonfire.

What's Next?

As we refine the implementation, ideas are already flowing:

- Personal blog pages: Do users want an optional dedicated blog section on their profile, maybe with tabs to easily switch between notes, articles, or other content types?

- Instance curation: Could instance moderators pin and showcase their best articles on the homepage?

- Enhanced authoring: Should we create specialized UIs for properly writing and managing blog posts?

- Email subscriptions: Non-fediverse users could subscribe via email to federated blogs?

The possibilities are endless, but we believe long-form content features should be shaped by actual community needs and designed collaboratively in the open, building upon FEP-b2b8 through real-world usage and experimentation.

Join the experiment

This is just the beginning. You can experience writing and reading articles on Bonfire today at our campground instance or by setting up your own Bonfire instance.

If your community is interested in test-driving or co-designing long-form content features, we’d love to collaborate.

To build a fully integrated, community-shaped publishing experience — and continue improving Bonfire in many other areas — we’re actively seeking support. You can back Bonfire on OpenCollective or get in touch to help shape the future of federated publishing.

---

What would you like to see in federated long-form content? Join the conversation and help us build the open social web together!