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 ​

@dajb@social.coop Heh yeah, not quite the same because these are represeting encryption keys, but here are some emoji ids I was working on yesterday.

@ivan ​

Today at 17 - 18:30 UTC / 18 - 19:30 CET we'll have an open video call in the internationalist union hall of tech workers' cooperatives and folks who want to start tech workers' cooperatives.

Come on by!

video: https://meet.jit.si/techcoops

chat: https://matrix.to/#/#techcoop:autonomic.zone

#coop #cooperative #democracy #workers #cooperativa #solidarity #union

As of September 2026, Google will no longer allow distributing apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google.

keepandroidopen.org

@keepandroidopen@techhub.social

#keepandroidopen

We had a great gathering for I ❤️ Free Software Day #ilovefs in Amsterdam! We had a simultaneous Dutch and English reading of a
Ada & Zangemann by @kirschner of @fsfe. Afterwards we had a discussion with @tommi and @mayel of @Bonfire . It was such a pleasure to work with @nicorikken and @Holly . Thank you to everyone who came for the afternoon and brought their kids! Great to read to the next generation.

We are ready for I ❤️ Free Software Day #ilovefs in Amsterdam! Looking forward to a wonderful double event with FSFE and Bonfire. @tommi @nicorikken @mayel

If you're in Amsterdam this Saturday join us for reading of Ada & Zangemann by @kirschner@mastodon.social & Sandra Brandstätter in English and in Dutch, followed by a conversation about Free Software maintenance as care work, together with @mayel from Bonfire, at the @internetarchiveeurope@toot.community, Oudeschans 16, Amsterdam on Saturday Feb 14th at 14:00. More information and RSVP here.

💕 I Love Free Software Day 2026 💕

For this year’s I Love Free Software Day I am co-organising two special events, and I am super excited about them!

• 🧶 Knitting Our Internet at Snackbar Frieda, Rotterdam, on Friday Feb 13th at 18:00. All information here.
• 🛹 A reading of @kirschner’s Ada & Zangemann in English and in Dutch. After that, a conversation about Free Software maintenance as care work, together with @mayel from @Bonfire ❤️‍🔥 at the @internetarchiveeurope, Oudeschans 16, Amsterdam on Saturday Feb 14th at 14:00. All information here. Info about the super cool poster in the post below.

#FreeSoftware #SoftwareFreedom #ILoveFS #ILoveFreeSoftware #ILoveFS #IloveFS26 #ournet #KnittingOurInternet #SnackbarFrieda #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #InternetArchive #InternetArchiveEurope #AZbook #Ada #AdaZangemann #reading #event #decentralizaion #InternetHistory #Internet

@mavnn@bonfire.mavnn.eu how did you try disabling locales?