Bonfire’s new software lets users build their own social communities, free from platform control

Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it’s powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it’s designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more control over how the app functions, which features and defaults are in place, and what their own roadmap and priorities will include. There’s a decidedly disruptive bent to the software, which describes itself as a place where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control.” In other words, its mission is to build social software where people get to make the decisions, not big tech platform makers like Meta or Google. The organization itself runs as a nonprofit funded by donations and grants, and it doesn’t take venture capital. Its code is open source, and it works in c ... Read full article.