ivan
ivan boosted

Taking a quick detour from our 1.0rc3 milestone work! 🛤️
This morning we added a small but meaningful feature:
🔗 Link previews now display the author's fediverse account when available.
➡️ Next up: Author attribution controls in Bonfire's verification settings, so writers can decide exactly how they're credited when their articles travel across the fediverse. ✍️
It will be available in next release to test it out!

ivan
ivan boosted

⁂ Article

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 forums, chat and event platforms, and resource-sharing databases. Individuals track their lives across fitness apps, reading lists, streaming services, knowledge management tools and more.

Each app serves its purpose, but they each create isolated silos where valuable activities, insights, and connections remain trapped behind separate logins and walled gardens.

What if you could keep using the tools built for your needs while opening them to your community or the broader fediverse according to your specific rules and boundaries?

🧰 Bridge your tools to the open web

Through our Mosaic initiative, leveraging the Bonfire modular framework, we offer like-minded organizations and communities the opportunity to build custom extensions that connect their homegrown or third-party applications to the fediverse. These bridges:

  • Import data from your existing tools
  • Transform it into rich ActivityPub activities for federation
  • Enable meaningful, two-way interactions
  • Respect your privacy boundaries and governance needs

The result? Your isolated tools become part of a connected, collaborative ecosystem.

Real-world examples: your tools, federated

Project management meets community feedback

Imagine your team uses a kanban board to manage development sprints. With a custom Bonfire extension, we could connect the service's API and monitor specific triggers like completed tasks, cards tagged with #feedback, or comments added.

When triggered, the extension would create ActivityPub objects with rich metadata: task description, relevant links, and progress context. Your fediverse followers would receive these as native posts they can react to, boost, and comment on. Their feedback would flow back through the extension as comments on the original card.

You would control the boundaries granularly, e.g. public for open source projects, followers-only for beta features, restricted to your instance for internal work, or anything in between. The two-way sync would ensure your project management tool remains the single source of truth while your community becomes an active participant in the development process.

Community resources go network-wide

Your mutual aid network could maintain a resource spreadsheet or database tracking offers, needs, and availability. Our extension would poll for new entries or status changes (by connecting to an API, listening to webhooks, or even directly reading the database or spreadsheet itself), converting them into structured ActivityPub objects with standardised properties for location and resource type taxonomy tags, and custom properties for quantity and urgency.

When someone marks "10 wool blankets available" or "urgent: need baby formula," it would federate as a rich post that other instances can parse intelligently. Neighboring mutual aid groups would see these in dedicated feeds or maps, filtered by resource type or geographic proximity.

The extension could handle resource matching across networks, suggesting possible connections between needs and offers while respecting each network's autonomy.

Events that travel beyond platform borders

Your organisation's calendar contains everything from public conferences to internal meetings. The extension would connect via calendar APIs (CalDAV, Google Calendar API, etc.) and intelligently parse event metadata: detecting whether events are public, extracting registration links, and identifying capacity limits.

Public events would become rich ActivityPub Event objects that federated platforms can display natively—Mobilizon and Bonfire instances would show them in event listings, Mastodon users would see them as interactive posts. RSVPs would flow back through via ActivityPub federation, updating your attendee count in real-time.

The extension could handle timezone conversions, recurring events, and last-minute changes. When you update event details, it would send an update to ensure all federated copies stay synchronised.

The possibilities are endless

Imagine federating your collaborative playlists to spark music discovery across communities. Or sharing fitness milestones that inspire distributed workout challenges. Or creating transparent financial reporting that builds trust with your supporter network.

Ready to give your tools superpowers?

The examples above showcase just a glimpse of what's possible when we bridge isolated tools to the fediverse. While these specific integrations are just ideas, they represent the transformative potential of Bonfire, and we're ready to build them with you.

Mosaic is a unique service where the Bonfire team works with you to co-design and build custom extensions entirely shaped around your community's needs.

Mosaic is perfect for you if:

  • You're frustrated by data trapped in isolated platforms
  • Your community wants to participate more but faces too many barriers
  • You believe in transparency and collaborative approaches
  • You're ready to pioneer new models of digital cooperation

What we offer:

  • Custom extension development tailored to your specific tools and workflows
  • Full control over privacy boundaries and federation rules
  • Ongoing support as your needs evolve
  • The opportunity to be among the first to explore federated tool integration

Let's start a conversation.

Whether you want to federate your project management, open up your resource database, or imagine entirely new possibilities, we're here to build it with you. Your use case could become the next example inspiring others to break down their digital silos.

Book a call with us or contact us at team@bonfire.cafe.

ivan
ivan boosted

⁂ Article

🔥 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 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

🌍 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! 🚀

ivan
ivan boosted

@tcrouzet Merci pour cet article, qui me permet de mettre au clair certains de mes propres sentiments diffus sur Mastodon. Je rebondis sur les perspectives : Mastodon est ce qu'il est, mais ce n'est qu'un élément du Fedivers, fédéré par ActivityPub, qui, lui-même, je suis d'accord aussi, me semble porteur d'espoir.

Sans citer in extenso les éléments de tes perspectives, j'ai l'impression que la plateforme @bonfire , qui est en train de naître en ce moment, pourrait répondre à certaines propositions : " que des blogs puissent suivre d’autres blogs et ainsi de suite" par exemple.

@bonfire est une plateforme libre, naissante, sur laquelle diverse fonctionnalités peuvent être implémentées à la demande : les développeurs (@ivan et @mayel ) appellent ça différents parfums (flavours) de Bonfire. Ils sont demandeurs de critiques et propositions pour l'évolution de leur plateforme et la création de parfums... dont un pourrait peut-être correspondre à tes souhaits. Je suis sûr que ton article peut les intéresser : l'un d'entre eux est francophone (@mayel).

La première "Release Candidate" vient de sortir ( bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bonf ) avec un premier parfum nommé Bonfire Social.

[Disclaimer : je suis impliqué avec les développeurs dans l'objectif de créer un parfum de Bonfire pour la communication scientifique : bonfirenetworks.org/oscars/ ]

@midzer@chaos.social @matt@oslo.town @jaz@toot.wales I am quite interested in hearing if there are features that could enhance a location-based fedi server experience...would love to build a #bonfire flavour for villages/bioregion 🏕️

ivan
ivan boosted

> "Inspired by @evan '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."

Here the article on how we are implementing articles in bonfire 😅

https://bonfire.cafe/post/01JYRX7HCGME693BGCZF6AGGK1

"[...] Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier… and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable… to sit alone with images on a screen… given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses, but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfpOugmd9E

ivan
ivan boosted

Torna Scambi Festival!

(🇬🇧 English version below)

📍La Pigna, Sanremo (IM)

🗓️ 20–24 agosto 2025

🫶🏻 Scambi è un festival esperienziale organizzato interamente volontariз under-30. Qui si condividono idee, passioni, visioni attraverso laboratori interattivi e attività su diversi filoni tematici:

  • 🌻 Giustizia sociale e ambientale
  • 🌱 Decrescita ed economia locale/globale
  • 👾 Tecnologia Politica e resistenza al feudalesimo digitale
  • 🧠 Educazione e formazione

🔋 Il Programma

20 agosto → Giornata aperta al pubblico, con laboratori e una serata di musica live con @kenobit, Mano Manita e Dietro l’Angolo.
21–24 agosto → Vita condivisa tra partecipanti: assemblee, discussioni, gruppi di lavoro, tuffi al mare e giretti nel ponente ligure.

👉🏻 Se l’idea ti incuriosisce, compila la Call for Participation, ⚠️ aperta fino al 20 luglio 2025!

✨ Ti aspettiamo! ✨

#ScambiFestival#Scambi#Festival#Italia#Sanremo#LaPigna#Scambi2025 #decrescita#CfP #invito #iscrizione #evento #estate#Liguria #giovani#TecnologiaPolitica #politica #tecnologia #educazione #formazione