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

Bonfire's mission is to build social software where people get to make the decisions, not big tech platform makers like Meta or Google.

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.

Bonfire Social, now offered as a 1.0 Release Candidate ahead of the public release, is just one representation of what Bonfire offers. Bonfire calls it a “flavor.”

Each flavor is a preconfigured bundle of Bonfire extensions, features, and defaults, sort of like a starting template. 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, instead of being subject to the whims of a platform maker with an ever-changing feature sets and algorithms

Bonfire is part of the Fediverse, so it's nice to see it launch getting coverage