Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities in open social fabric, which began on Thursday during Fediforum Online Conference. While Bonfire Social is a federal application, which means it is powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it is designed to be more articulated and customizable. This means that bonfire communities have more control over the way the application operates, what functions and defaults are in force and what their own course map and priorities will include.
There is a decisively annoying bent in the software, which describes itself as a place where “all living beings thrive and communities bloom, free of private interest and capitalist control”.
In other words, its mission is to build social software where people make decisions, not the big technology platforms such as Meta or Google.
The organization itself runs as a non -profit organization funded by donations and grants and does not receive business capital. His code is open and works in collaboration with communities and researchers who use it to create and enhance electronic digital spaces.
The Bonfire Social, now offered as a 1.0 -release release candidate in front of public liberation, is just a representation of what Bonfire offers. Bonfire calls it “taste”.
Each taste is a predetermined beam of fire extensions, features and defaults, as a starting model. When a community chooses to perform a specific “taste”, it takes to rule the application as it considers appropriate, adding its own extensions and defining its own product change map. This puts the social software back under the control of users, rather than being subject to the whims of a platform manufacturer with constantly changing sets and algorithms.
The organization is already developing other flavors, such as the Bonfire and Open Science community, and Bonfire software allows any other community to create its own version.
At Bonfire Social, users will recognize well -known features, such as feeding and tools to follow users, share posts, create user profiles, flag contents or content and much more.
However, it also offers other tools and features that traditional social networks may not have, such as tools to adapt to power supply, support for inserting discussions, hosting multiple profiles per user, rich text posts and access control features.
Adapted feeds are a key differentiation between fire and traditional social media applications.
Although the idea of ​​monitoring custom power supplies is something that has been spread by newer social networks such as Bluesky or social browsers such as Flipboard surf, tools for creating these supplies are maintained by third parties. Bonfire offers its own custom supply tools in a simple interface that does not require users to understand coding.
To create feeds, users can filter and classify content by type, date, level of dedication, source snapshot and much more, including something that calls “cycles”.
Those who lived in the era of Google+ social networks may be familiar with the concept of circles. In Google’s social network, users organized contacts in groups called circles for optimized sharing. This idea lives in Bonfire, where a circle represents a list of people. This can be a group of friends, a fan group, local users, organizers in a mutual assistance group or anything else that users can find. These circles are private by default, but they can be shared with others.
Another unique feature for Bonfire Social is the limits that allow you to check who can see or deal with your content. For example, you could share a post with a number of your circles, but only allow a particular cycle to comment.
Bonfire also supports threaded conversations (inserted discussions), where the answers can branch their own degradations. This can be useful for communities where deeper discussions and cooperation are more valuable than those where everyone competes for attention.
In addition, Bonfire users can customize the application using one of the 16 built -in topics or can design their own layout and choose their own colors and fonts.
Bonfire accounts can also host multiple profiles that have their own fans, content and settings. This could be useful for those who just prefer to have public and private profiles, but also for those who need to share a specific profile with others – such as a profile for a business, a publication, a collective or project team.
Other launch features include PWA support for mobile devices, Community block lists, custom emoji support, full text search (with opt out), immediate messages, private group discussions (also with inserts) and much more. Extensions, which add different features, can be activated or disabled by both administrators and users. Managers just decide what the defaults are.
This means that users could activate or disable the functions they do not like, even basic features such as aid or aid (the federal version of retweet/repost).
Because Bonfire is built on ActivityPub, it is also federal with Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon and more.
The software is intended to be self-installation, although it works Develop a hosting network is in progress. For those who just want to kick the tires, A demonstration is available.
