- The homepage has a bunch of "Bonfire is...", but they don't tell me much about how Bonfire achieves any of those goals like to be a "commons".

- There's a codebase and documentation, but it comes in six different "flavours", although I can only really differentiate between two.

- Most of the FAQs just say "wip".

- It proudly states that there are no ads, no tracking, etc, but doesn't tell me what there are no ads on, or what isn't tracking me.

- It proudly states that it's federated, but as far as what it federates with, that's "wip".

I'm all for more federation, more data control, and experiments in social networking, but I'm a technical user and I have no idea what this is or does. It feels like in service of wanting to be as abstract and flexible, it maybe just doesn't solve any actual concrete problems.

If it's a toolkit with which to build social networks, that's great, but much of the documentation suggests that it's also a network itself, suggesting perhaps limited use as a toolkit. If it supports ActivityPub or AtProto, it really needs to come out and say that up front. "Bonfire is a framework for building custom AtProto based social networking applications" would be a great summary, or "Bonfire is a Mastodon alternative exploring the frontier of ActivityPub federated applications" would be great too.

It is something about community, the sense of belonging, glorified bureaucracy, being slow, and good writing. A Kinfolk of software.

Relevant meme: "I took LSD last night and had this vision of a federated social network that will disrupt the world. Will you help bring it to fruition? I can't offer any money right now"

https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html

Further down the page it says it is built in Elixir with Phoenix/LiveView and PostgreSQL.

Bonfire social is built on it. https://bonfire.cafe is a Bonfire social instance. Looks very Mastodon. Here are some other apps built on Bonfire: https://bonfirenetworks.org/apps/

Only when getting to the Architecture [4] section much later in the docs, it starts mentioning ActivityPub, but still no useful description of the project - "an unusual piece of software" is the only provided bit. Is it a framework, a new protocol, a network? Looks like the former - an application to write ActivityPub based software, but I'm only 50% sure.

[1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/about/

[2] https://bonfirenetworks.org/design/

[3] https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html

[4] https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/architecture.html

I think it's like when they were saying "blockchain is a technology and bitcoin it's its first application" kind of thing.

- Ember - social networking toolkit

- Social - fb/activitypub feed like

- Community - fb groups (wonder if they have voting based admin)

- Open Science - a peer review app?

- Coordination - ticket/kanban/w/e productivity software

- Cooperation - fb marketplace?

But I don’t know!

Are these mutually exclusive or can you run all at the same time? Can a “social” talk to a “community”? Is an “ember” actually able to do anything by itself? Can a “social” talk to a Mastodon instance?

Don't include me in your prisoned worldview at the end of history. I'll point back to a similar comment on some dumb thing called Diaspora 15 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324161

And then to non-corporate sponsored queerfolk making ActivityPub, a terrible failure ignored and forgotten (/s), and then to all the various Fediverse apps, who would never ever compete with Twitter, on and on and on.

The slogan "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest", was coined in 1817. The Haymarket Riot was 1886. The Bull Moose Party's platform in 1912 included the 8 hour workday in its platform. It wasn't signed into law until 1933.

We haven't even began understanding as a society the importance of the digital commons and the need for communities to build their own online townsquare. Theres so much more to do.

Go to Main Page

Scroll down to go to the "Code of Conduct"

Search on "Reverse"

Read

"Our community prioritises marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Moderators reserve the right not to act on complaints regarding:

‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia.’ or critiques of racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behaviors or assumptions."

Ask yourself if you want to be a part of a community of people that condones certain racism and sexism.

For example discrimination based on race is racism, objectively. Creating a reverse-ism out of that subjectively singles out a particular identity to champion. An effective code of conduct would not mention such subjectivity in any form.

I do agree that it’s unkind to treat those two isms differently, or to condone one while tolerating the other - but pretending that there’s not such thing as the ‘reverse’ case seems silly, when it’s so easy to define and easy to IRL.

Their inclusivity assumes the unchallenged dominance of their own culture.

As someone who is not white and not entirely western I find it very off putting.

As in, the "you should read Popper" comment was in response to somebody saying they though opting out of moderation/censorship was not good. I think Popper would broadly agree with this, and say that moderating out racism, transphobia etc is essential for good discourse.

This is all unfounded obviously, since Popper didn't ever use or write about social media.

The CoC provides a justification for this decision—which, to elaborate on its rather simple framing, is that offensive rhetoric directed at minorities is qualitatively different from its inverse because it can incite racial violence and control the Overton window.* ebisoka doesn't consider this a worthy reason for the site's policies to admit to a biased moderation policy, but it's a deliberate nuance in the design that isn't captured in a simple description of the paradox of tolerance. (It's not an entirely problem-free policy, but the moderators aren't being instructed to ignore all abuse directed at majoritarians, just to be selective in what they tolerate. Antipathy is not quite the same as intolerance.)

Note also that ebisoka began the post with "these sites are easy to figure out," which suggests there is a multiplicity of sites like Bonfire that can be summarized (and therefore dismissed) purely on the basis of their Codes of Conduct. It's a fishing expedition for instances of affirmative action.

ebisoka put a lot of work into ensuring that post would slip by the radar for the average reader, but it's basically the same pattern of euphemisms that is guiding the Right's current crusade against DEI.

* Some strings attached. 1) Not as true in pluralistic societies or societies with near-equal splits; mostly a problem when the dominant group is vastly larger than the others. Hence other commenters remarking that this is a West-centric policy. 2) At the extreme end of the spectrum are places like South Africa and Zimbabwe, where the lingering populations of lower-class white people are subject to the double-whammy of lack of representation or advocacy in society and government, plus being the targets of resentment over colonialism.

From reading the 'about' page I understood that this is a new social media platform in the Fediverse.

Now there is obviously one question: why should I participate in this and not in the existing projects like Mastodon? Why did you split up?

I suggest the Bonfire people should put the answer to that question on the top of the 'about' page.

If Bonfire isn't compatible with Mastodon or Lemmy it doesn't fit into the former category.

(Anyone who's tried to implement ActivityPub knows it's a lie. You implement Mastodon Protocol or Lemmy Protocol. If you follow ActivityPub you'll be alone on your own new protocol)

Why using Bonfire? The first thing that comes up to me from the website is that this model of community-focused development seems more resilient to the wave of AI slop. A small Mastodon instance with 30-40 active people and limited federation would be useless. A Bonfire instance with the same people where you can work on community projects or scientific projects, sounds a lot more viable while keeping the shields up against the slop.

This is so true, I've had to put a timer on how much I can use it as I'm addicted like the old school reddit days

I think all it'll take is reddit messing up and lemmy.world might be the new front page of the internet

That permanently lost me from reddit, I tried kbin.social for as long as it was up and I really liked using it. I never really got on with lemmy for some reason. The outcome ended up being me just not using reddit like things, and I really don't miss it that much.

I like people like this and admire their purpose, but they often don't make anything but manifestos. I make stuff, and I'm friends with other people who are sympathetic with this sort of thing and also make stuff.

Periodically we all make stuff and give it out to people, which in its own way helps cool the burning world, I guess. And folks like this make another manifesto when the previous ones didn't get people like me and my friends to lay down our tools and go to work for them.

It's a challenge, sort of. By which I mean: if the job is to get lots of things made, not so much. But if the job is to think this stuff out, well they're doing more of that than I am. I don't get a lot of help, or seek it: I'm focussed on what is waiting to be done within my jurisdiction. That's a limiting factor, but it serves my purposes :)

I think before we talk about being only paid once for software (which isn't a finished product like a brick anyway) we need to figure that out.

The benefit of doing it this way was that the user had a choice in upgrading which aligned incentives between users and developers. The developer had to deliver tangible improvements in order to keep payments from existing users coming. These days they change the color scheme every six months, remove features, change the UI for no dicernable reason and label the whole changelog "Various changes and bug fixes" when the product is clearly a mature product that should be in maintenance mode with no significant changes required.

I guess I would like to see someone make the Once model work to great success. I don't know how you would deal with updates and stuff, but that's what I meant. One "simple" solution is just charging the LTV (or something that's close to it) as the one-time price.

But anyways, it looks like some kind of framework for social networks that is highly politicized and supposedly puts people at the forefront but has no problem using AI slop for its illustrations.

To scale up to a billion+ users of [whatever], it's easier if every user controls their own data (and some of 'nearby' users) on their own devices. Logically you'd need P2P between those billion+ users to make that network as a whole work.

BUT: figuring out how to do that well, is hard. Doing that in centralized manner (centralized database, users are clients only, etc) is easier. And gives maximum control to whoever starts it.

Of course scaling that means big hosting / bandwidth costs, to recoup (and profit!), enter advertising & all the bad incentives that come with it.

Like you, I hope the ad-supported everything crap is just a transitional stage, and by-the-people, for-the-people becomes the norm.

But P2P services done well is hard. The struggles of crypto coins, (truly) decentralized file sharing, and would-be FB competitors are just a few examples.

it definitely helps to have scars, though. just pray something/someone takes you out of the pain soon enough (it took me ~4y to finally realize there has to be a better way at least for small/medium projects)

> is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico.[4][5][6][7]

I don't mean to preach political theory now, but as far as I can see we're already collectively pretty divided (divide and conquer comes to mind): for a project that seems to preach all manner of fairness and correction of a system gone wrong, and is arguably moderately anti-capitalist (in the sense of objecting some of the status-quo product of Silicon Valley's mode of operation), do we really need to be thrown all the way to the other end of the left-right scale? Is Bonfire arguing for the analogue of "militant revolution" of software?

Imagining the project now, I am envisioning green-clad militants writing "fair" software. While not without merit, in my opinion the explicit political associations detract from the intrinsic value something like Bonfire could have for us, who are indeed have never been more firmly under the boot of the commercial IT industry than now.

In Latin America, there are many communities that have suffered because of specific capitalist ventures: a banana plantation, a copper mine, etc.

You have to acknowledge these things and offer a better version of capitalism if you want diminish this divide.

People are funny.

Im going to assume you're a reasonable person and have been watching some news. You probably think like I do that its good for society to follow some laws and have some checks on different groups power.

Hows that working out right now? You know without meaningful militancy on one side of the political spectrum.

Its been my experience when people ask for "politics" to be taken out of a thing they implicitly ask for the politics of the status quo. Which is domination by the commercial software industry and anything else the rich own, because they write the laws.

To the point that Uber said they may never generate profit in their IPO filing

That's meaningless -- just legal boilerplate.

No one wants to be sued for their dog & pony show sales pitch, so they always hedge by including explicit doom & gloom scenarios in the legal paperwork.

Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps of all sizes.

However legal or meaningless, it's their official stated position. And they did lose close to 20 billion in total before turning a meagre profit.

> so they always hedge by including explicit doom & gloom scenarios in the legal paperwork.

Ah yes, "we may never turn a profit that's why we are a sustainable long-term serious company and you should definitely buy our stock" is a thing that every company writes in their legal boilerplate.

> Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps of all sizes.

Uber's annual reports were "we lost a billion dollars this year, like every other year before that for 15 years, but look at our growth go brrr"

Same for most of other HN darlings.

Every public corp's "official stated position" on future profitability is, from a legal perspective, the same:

No promises. We might fail because of (long list of endogenous and exogenous reasons). Past performance is no guarantee of future results. We see headwinds here, here, and here. There are headwinds that we cannot see. We can't predict the future. Some hostile actor in some country, foreign or domestic, might screw us all by legal, political, or military means. Also, natural disasters, pandemics, asteroids, and trends. Don't sue us.

In modern business profitability never enters the equation.

They mean absolutely nothing about what management expects for the future of the company. They are just legal boilerplate that is always included.