Haven't turned on Federation yet, but my Bonfire instance is looking good. My second install of Bonfire. I can tell you two things: Installation was much easier this time, and performance is much better.
One note, Bonfire recommends a hungry 8 GB of memory to run, but with that amount, it runs nicely so far. I'll keep you updated, hoping to turn federation on by next weekend. (This will be an invite only instance for brave individuals that want to assist with testing)
To get a real benefit from them you’d need to have a solid set
of 5-10 collaborators to try out stuff like circles and boundaries.
It's modular. Devs can create plug-ins to add features. For example, you can run different "apps", including social (Mastodon-like), community (Forum-like) while using the same core components but different feature sets.
The social app is the first release candidate, with a unique feature of boundaries, your posts can be shared to specific people within your "circles".
Bonfire is really cool. And this kind of stuff is absolutely the future of the Fediverse. This movement started with the *key forks and alternate Mastodon UIs, but it's leading directly to an "installable apps" future that will be amazing.
It's so hard to build a good ActivityPub implementation. So why do we keep doing it over and over for relatively small feature changes?
That can be tough to maintain though. Either you have a small group of maintainers… or you have spam posts.
