Bonfire Social introduced a new platform designed to help users create independent online communities free from the constraints and control of conventional social media giants. Announced on Thursday during the FediForum online conference, the software is built on ActivityPub, the same open protocol underpinning platforms like Mastodon, but offers significantly greater flexibility and customization.
The primary goal of Bonfire Social is to provide users and communities full control over the structure, features, and governance of their social media experiences, entirely independent from corporate influences or profit interests. According to its developers, Bonfire Social symbolizes an alternative vision where “all living beings thrive and communities flourish,” free from commercial pressures.
Structured as a nonprofit, Bonfire operates exclusively through donations and grants and explicitly avoids venture capital funding. Its entire software stack is open-source and has been co-designed in collaboration with community users and researchers, emphasizing a strong community-led development process.
Currently released as a 1.0 Release Candidate ahead of its public availability, Bonfire Social represents just one built-in version, referred to by Bonfire as a “flavor.” Each flavor is preconfigured with specific features, extensions, and default settings, acting as a customizable template for the communities adopting it. This approach allows community administrators to set their own feature roadmap and governance rules, ensuring the social software aligns closely with their members’ shared values or goals rather than adapting to the decisions of larger corporate platform managers.
Plans for additional flavors, such as Bonfire Community and Open Science, are already underway, and the Bonfire infrastructure enables any community to create entirely new, customized flavors adapted to their specific interests and requirements.
Familiar social features, including user profiles, content publishing, following feeds, flagging or blocking posts, and sharing content, are all available. Bonfire, however, goes beyond conventional tools by offering robust customization options. Users can manage multiple separate profiles from a single account, create nested conversations for detailed and nuanced discussions, and use extensive formatting in their posts.
One standout feature of Bonfire is the ability to craft custom feeds directly within the app itself, without relying on third-party integrations or extensive technical expertise. Users can filter and organize posts by criteria such as date, type, engagement level, or source community, as well as through a feature called “Circles,” reminiscent of Google+’s grouping mechanism. Circles in Bonfire function as custom audience groups for targeted sharing, which users can make private or share with selected others.
Another sophisticated control system within Bonfire is its “Boundaries” feature, a method through which users precisely manage how content is shared, viewed, or interacted with within their circles. For instance, users can selectively allow or restrict commenting access to just one circle while making the post visible to several circles.
Bonfire also supports threaded conversations and includes built-in tools for communities or users to establish specific behavioral norms, manage moderation collectively, and maintain protected group discussions. Further personalization is available through sixteen built-in themes, or users can craft entirely customized layouts, choosing fonts, colors, and visual styling.
Additional capabilities at launch cover direct messaging, customizable emojis, community-maintained blocklists, Progressive Web App (PWA) compatibility for seamless mobile usability, and integrations via the federated ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, and other federated platforms.
In the near future, Bonfire intends to expand usability by establishing a networked hosting solution, greatly simplifying setup for those who prefer not to self-host. Until then, a demonstration instance is available on the Bonfire website for users eager to explore and test the platform in action.
