Bonfire: building blocks for communities on the open social web

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https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community

Hey folks, anyone know more about this Bonfire project? It’s got a fundraiser going right now, and I was recently reminded about it by Erin Kissane after initially finding out about it back in June via Techcrunch, but I haven’t been actively tracking what they’ve accomplished since then.

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Looks like yet another social media product. Hard pass, even if their “circles” feature works like the one Google+ had back in the day. Also, their sovereignty vs solidarity rhetoric rubs me the wrong way. I’m not convinced you can have genuine solidarity without sovereignty.

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Yeah I kinda agree with starbreaker. My opinion is anything that is trying to look exactly like a twitter clone or something “but with a few improvements” gets a hard pass from me. I’m not sure what it’s adding that joining a mastodon or a discord doesn’t already solve. Circles sounds similar to FB groups or reddit or even how tumblr groups is used, which is not bad, but at the end of the day is it really making social connections or does it end up being just another feed wall or question-asking forum. Social media startups completely missed the point again and again by trying to mildly innovate/improve this one thing that everyone is exhausted with.

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Those are answers to a question other than the one I asked.

Anyway, here’s some of what I know so far:

  • The circles feature sounds like the access lists on Dreamwidth, and the planned groups feature sounds like community features, which are some of the things to get my attention when I first heard about the project.
  • The funding so far has come from donations and grants, no indications of venture capital, unlike Bluesky, Ello, Spill, and BeReal.
  • From the look and sound of things, it does seem like they’re treating Mastodon as a primary point of reference. There’s a lot of talk of federation as a priority, the demo site has that crowded three-column layout I hate, tags are inline text, and replies show up on feeds and can be reblogged as if they’re new posts.

Here are some things I don’t know:

  • How open they are to pivoting toward other points of inspiration that aren’t Mastodon or Bluesky. For the goals and priorities they’ve described, I think borrowing more from Dreamwidth could be a good fit. I have asked about this and haven’t gotten a reply.
  • Who might create something with this, if they haven’t already. The creators of Bonfire have said they don’t want to create a flagship instance, which is why they only have a demo site that isn’t federated, so I don’t know who else is looking at creating a Bonfire site or what the scene for that currently looks like.