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.
