Discussion

Today is announcement day 🔥

Bonfire is shifting its centre of gravity: from social features to community tools. Four things ship today, and the whole story is here: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bo...

1. Bonfire for communities
Groups and topics, community rules, decision-making (from quick polls through structured consensus to weighted score voting, where an objection can count for more than an approval), events, shared organisation profiles, announcements.

A ready-to-use space you can then take apart: add what's missing, fork what almost fits, switch off what you don't need.

2. Our first Mosaic case study
Six months with Jacobin's German edition, building jacobin.social from the ground up: a home for 3,000+ readers, wired into their Ghost publication, in their language and their look and feel. Their readers crowdfunded the project, which included a reboot of the magazine and a new community space. Now every publisher can benefit. What one community funds, every community inherits. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/case-stu...

3. A deep Ghost integration
Keep publishing exactly as you do now, and Bonfire can become the home for everything that happens around the work: your archive imported, new articles followed, members and tiers synced, sign-in through Ghost, federated discussion under every piece. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/ghost/

4. The Telling
One script tag turns any web page into a federated conversation. Readers reply with an account they already have, on Bonfire, Mastodon, anywhere. The thread lives on your server, and you can take it with you. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/telling/

Being straight with you: this is a 1.0 beta. Groups work within a server and don't federate yet. We're designing that in the open with the W3C groups task force, because we'd rather it work across the whole fediverse than ship a dialect only Bonfire speaks.

Want to poke at it? Groups are live on the campground, our open test instance. Make an account and try it out: campground.bonfire.cafe

Finally, we've rebuilt the website to reflect the new direction: bonfirenetworks.org/

Now back to following up with crowdfunding backers to organise install parties, co-design workshops, and other rewards. Thank you for your patience 💛 #fediverse #ActivityPub

@thefulcrum@www.thefulcrum.dev @ivan pinged them now

@hongminhee@hollo.social yeah that's exactly why I decided years ago to go "all in" on ActivityPub instead of scuttlebutt.nz which was in every other way a very cool technology and community.

Thinking on how the pattern that Substack represents keeps happening and Substack is just the latest prominent version of it.

People want to have the possibility of publishing extended and/or rich media stuff in the context of something that feels like *their* website.

But they also want their website not to be an island. They want it to be embedded in a community. And they definitely want the **absolute minimum of technical overheads**.

But the dilemma is…

@renchap@oisaur.com nice catching up at the conference! could you please point us to info about federation replies under a thread collection instead of needing backfilling? it may also turn out to be useful for e2ee spec...

cc @ivan @Bonfire

@julian@activitypub.space awesome 😊

@julian@activitypub.space will that work for you or are you sending Note with summary but no sensitive tag?

@ivan @liaizon@social.wake.st @smallcircles@social.coop @evan@cosocial.ca @thisismissem@activitypub.space

@julian@activitypub.space we added an exception for Article but will switch to instead only do that for Note.

@thisismissem@activitypub.space @evan@cosocial.ca @ivan @smallcircles@social.coop @liaizon@social.wake.st

we draw on design workshops to sketch out a vision of trust bubbles, coalition-building, and shared vocabularies. what really excites me is that the ecosystem participants envisioned was quite coherent - we're actually now developing some ideas for tools 🧰🔧 + resources 📝 in partnership with @Bonfire

in this paper in particular, we highlight tensions around autonomy and labor + identify three principles of design (modularity, polycentricity, forkability) that are guiding our ongoing efforts!

@olm_e@tchafia.be students in the class led by @s0hw@hci.social and @andresmh@hci.social at hci.princeton.edu have worked on something like this which was previewed at the last #FediForum and will launch in the summer...

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io

I tried to address your first point here: github.com/swicg/activitypub...

Not sure I understand why you say "server will end up with that information in cleartext at some point" though?

@evan@cosocial.ca

Our @fediforum@mastodon.social demo is up! 🔥

We showed off Bonfire Mosaic and our ongoing work on federated groups and new publisher tools we’ve been co-designing with jacobin.de, including federated discussion threads that can be embedded on their existing website.

Built on our modular framework for community-governed digital spaces.

Watch 👉 spectra.video/w/hV9wzGzsXvNj...

RE: https://bonfire.cafe/pub/objects/01KQETGFGP24Y7VTSHZRDA7KQ1

hey y'all #FediForum ☀️

Who is up for a session on the '+1' concept/strategy and its potential further development?

(AFIAK +1 was coined in the 'contemporary open social web context' by @rstockm, see https://offene-netzwerke.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Paper_Alliance-Open-Networks-and-Democratic-Public-Sphere_251130.pdf)

I'd suggest to go for this AFTER the session that @mayel proposes here, because I feel like this paper presents very useful results to base such a session on.

Sounds interesting? Let's go!

The paper Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media by @s0hw@hci.social @andresmh@hci.social and colleagues at hci.princeton.edu (which we will discuss at #FediForum today) takes on a tension at the heart of decentralised social media. The fediverse promises to empower communities to govern themselves and set norms in their own context, on their own terms. But communities can't actually govern in isolation. Their members talk across boundaries, bad actors hop between servers, and the rules one community sets can directly undermine another's. The authors call these "governance frictions."

Their argument is that we've spent a lot of design effort looking inside communities, like improving moderation tools and onboarding, but almost none on what they call inter-community governance: the infrastructure that lets communities coordinate, share information, and manage their relationships with each other.

To explore what that infrastructure could look like, they ran four design workshops with 24 Fediverse admins, moderators, and developers. Participants imagined ideal tools, and the authors synthesized those ideas into six concrete challenges, like making governance decisions visible, sharing nuanced information about issues, controlling who you share what with, and minimizing barriers to adoption.

The synthesis lands on three design principles:

Modularity: communities need a shared vocabulary, like a "Governance Nutrition Facts" label, so they can read each other parsimoniously.

Polycentricity: communities should sit in overlapping "trust bubbles," not one global network, so they can have nuanced, evolving relationships.

And forkability: communities should be able to copy and adapt each other's governance structure and rules, preserving autonomy while reducing labor.

The big takeaway: decentralisation alone isn't enough. If we want community-run social media to actually work, we need to design the connective tissue between communities, and the design principles here may apply well beyond the Fediverse, to any platform where multiple communities coexist.

bonfire.cafe/post/01KQETGFGP...

Today at #FediForum we'll have a discussion with some of the co-authors of the academic paper Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media. There's no better time to read this paper!

bonfire.cafe/post/01KQDCWGK0...

If you're attending #FediForum let's have a discussion tomorrow around this open access paper: Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media which argues that decentralized platforms like the Fediverse focus on governing within communities, but ignore the frictions between them. From workshops with 24 Fediverse community organisers, they identify six design challenges (visibility of governance decisions, collating issue information, controlling what's shared and with whom, enabling new inter-community relationships, customising governance, and minimizing adoption barriers) and propose three principles for "inter-community governance": modularity (shared vocabulary, like governance nutrition labels) and forkability (copy and adapt others' governance structure or rules), and polycentricity (overlapping trust bubbles instead of one global network, i.e. archipelagos).

Decentralisation and autonomy alone aren't enough, communities need connective tissues to interconnect them beyond just technical federation (a mycelium network if you like 😊)

If you're interested and are able to read or peruse it ahead of time that will help us have a more grounded and potentially productive discussion based on it...

We just released Bonfire 1.0.2, an update focused on giving you a more stable and reliable experience.

We're also heads-down working with several communities who are setting up their own Bonfire servers.

Plus updates on end to end encryption and federated groups.

More details: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bo...

It was a really fun event, thanks again for the invitation! @internetarchiveeurope@toot.community @tommi@pan.rent @nicorikken@mastodon.nl @Holly@pan.rent ​