Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that's a feature, not a bug. The project's very structure is about enabling a tapestry of social spaces, all built with shared building blocks but diverging in flavour, practice, and purpose. In this post we embrace the project's plurality and explore the many ways people around the web describe and understand Bonfire.

1. Familiar yet different: not (just) another Mastodon #

Many pin Bonfire as “Mastodon-adjacent”, but see both a family resemblance and a revolution brewing:

> "Bonfire Social seems to be a Mastodon alternative?"^14

> "Mastodon sets out to create a single optimized interface for a short form social network. Bonfire sets out to let you create different interfaces that match what your unique community needs..."^1

Or, as another puts it:

> "Bonfire, the swiss knife fused with a dremel of the fediverse"^15

2. Bonfire as a toolkit or framework for building community platforms **#

A recurring theme is that Bonfire is fundamentally not just a social platform, but an extensible toolkit or framework:

> "Bonfire is a framework to put together different configurable communities or social networks based on ActivityPub. ... Bonfire sets out to let you create different interfaces that match what your unique community needs through extensions."^1

> "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)... hoping devs can pick and choose feature sets they want to build unique platforms. Like fediverse legos."^2

> "Both a platform like mastodon, and a toolkit for internet community software..."^3

Or as one commenter quips:

> "Beneath the surface, there’s a bigger story ... rather than simply being a social platform, it’s also a development framework."^4

3. Flavours and extensions: customisation and plurality by design **#

What makes Bonfire unique is the flavour and extension model, which means each instance could feel totally different:

> "In Bonfire, Extensions are first-class citizens... ranging from the federation library to data access controls to mutual aid tools ... pick and choose which ones to use, then bundle them together into a single app experience. Bonfire calls these experiences Flavors..."^4

> "Each flavor is a preconfigured bundle ... When a community opts to run a particular 'flavor,' it gets to govern the app as it sees fit, adding its own extensions and determining its own roadmap for product changes. This puts the social software back under users’ control..."^5

One commenter likens Bonfire to "a social networking-focused Nextcloud,"^6 while another compares it to "getting all your friends together for a big barn-raising, and then each of you gets to customize and decorate your own interior unit. The foundation is prepared for you and all the timber and roofing supplies are available."^7

Or succinctly:

> "Fediverse platform built for customization and extension as a one sentence explanation."^8

4. Commons and cooperative ethos, not just software **#

Bonfire’s modularity isn’t just technical, but philosophical:

> "Bonfire is building a modular toolkit for communities with the decentralised, commons patterns at heart..."^9

> "kind of a framework to build fediverse apps… putting a lot is emphasis on community and cooperative aspects."^21

> "The team describes Bonfire as open, community-first infrastructure, and their design is explicitly for communities rather than individual people." Bonfire is "a 'third path' between blockchain’s emphasis on individual sovereignty and Big Tech’s centralisation, one that centers collective care and community autonomy."^10

Bonfire’s own flavor offerings, like the Open Science Network, are co-designed with stakeholders:

> "Each feature is being co-designed with organisations bringing domain expertise, from Princeton HCI’s research on collective governance to Co-op Cloud’s work on community hosting infrastructure."^10

5. Granular boundaries & empowerment of communities and individuals **#

Many point out this signature capability: fine-tuned privacy and boundaries.

> "...with a unique feature of boundaries, your posts can be shared to specific people within your 'circles'."^2

> "On peut gérer avec précision qui peut voir/intéragir avec les messages avec un système de cercles."^11

Other features noted include:

• Custom feeds
• Multiple independent profiles per user
• Portability & content migration tools
• "Group-based visibility and feeds with Circles and extremely granular controls for who can see, reply to, and otherwise interact with posts using Boundaries."^12

6. Diverse use cases & flavours in practice **#

Far from being “just another Mastodon,” Bonfire’s architecture enables specialized communities and use cases:

> "An example of what you can do with the blocks: Bonfire’s Open Science community project ... was co-designed with working scholars to build something that served them, specifically. ... It’s designed to integrate scholarly data..."^12

It’s also being tried out for:

> "experimenting with #Bonfire as a platform for Buddhist monasteries."^13

And for those seeking sanctuary from Facebook groups:

> "Would it be an alternative place to put facebook groups? There are fb groups doing important things like Buy Nothing Project, food sharing etc.... I'm really looking forward to community-built and community-hosted alternatives."^7

7. Bonfire's potential and the challenge of defining it **#

If there's a through-line, it's excitement and a sense that Bonfire eludes easy description:

> "I've been very hyped for Bonfire for quite some time..."^11

> "This is...starting to feel like an endgame platform for me."^16

> "Bonfire is really cool. And this kind of stuff is absolutely the future of the Fediverse..."^20

> "I really need to make some time to play with @bonfire . I love the idea of it but the practicalities are confusing the f out of me..."^17

> "I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building..."^3

> "I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It's hard to tell what it is."^18

8. Yet-to-be-defined: blank space for new flavours **#

What is Bonfire? An evolving answer. There are “empty slots” for flavours, use cases, approaches, and communities not yet imagined or built:

> "Open Science Network is a 'network', kind of like Mastodon. It is built with Bonfire... You can also create other custom 'networks' using Bonfire? ... All of them speak ActivityPub, so you can follow individual accounts from Mastodon?... Perhaps a different tack... What if you could create your own Mastodon server, but instead brand it with your organization's identity? What if it had additional easily customizable features like [fill in] to tailor your social media network to the needs of your organization?... That's Bonfire."^19

Ask not what Bonfire is, ask what it could be, in your hands.

Want to join us in building the future of Bonfire? Support and share the crowdfunding campaign to join install parties, workshops, co-design sessions, and more!

We’ve prototyped the core groups functionality; next we’ll build the tools communities need, co‑designing the UX with partner communities, learning from pilots and iterating in the open, to ensure groups federate across Bonfire instances and compatible fediverse apps.

Our north star is maximum compatibility: we’ll align with standards and collaborate across the ecosystem, while keeping usability and real workflows front and centre so people and groups can safely interconnect across servers and platforms. For details on portability and interop, see the FAQ).

We need your help **#

If this resonates, please back the groups stretch goal so we can deliver federated groups, bring your community into the co‑design process or join as a pilot group, and share the campaign with your networks.

Together we can give communities durable homes that cross server boundaries while staying open and portable, without trading away autonomy for convenience, so communities can organise, document, and coordinate in spaces they control. Let’s build the tools communities deserve, and let's make them community‑owned from the start.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) #

Will this work with Mastodon? **#

To begin with, Mastodon users should be able to interact with federated groups at a basic level. Group posts and replies will appear as standard activities to Mastodon users, and they'll be able to follow and @‑mention groups. Some specific features may not be supported in Mastodon and will appear as links back to the group’s home server.

What about old‑fashioned forums? **#

Forums are excellent for structured, long‑form discussion. Threads nest neatly, topics stay organised, and communities build rich archives over time. They’re also often self‑hosted, governed and moderated by their community rather than at the whims of a Big Tech platform. But classic forums are typically isolated on a single site. You need to create a new account for each one and remember check for updates regularly (or endure noisy email notifications). If you move on, you lose the network, content, and reputation you built there, as forums rarely interconnect with each other or the wider social web.

Groups in Bonfire are inspired by the best of forums (community-run with clear topics and findable archives) while being portable and interconnected across the fediverse from the start. A group is not only a set of threads; it also has rules (who can find it and join, who can post or participate, who can see what's posted, and codes of conduct and moderation processes), a list of members and moderators, and content such as events, shared resources, and other lightweight workflows living in one context, so organising feels natural. You have a single identity on your home server from which you can join and participate in groups on any server, rather than being stuck on a single site.

We should note that Discourse modernised the forum experience with cleaner UX and solid organisational tools and has an experimental federation plugin to enable forums to exchange some activity. NodeBB is a similarly modern forum app that has implemented federation and integrates with the fediverse. These are important steps we support and want to interconnect with.