Slow software for a burning world
50 comments
·May 10, 2025danpalmer
antfarm
"Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online."
https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html
Further down the page it says it is built in Elixir with Phoenix/LiveView and PostgreSQL.
FrustratedMonky
A new federated protocol? or does this provide a different front end to an existing Federated system?
chobeat
it's a set of plugins built on top of ActivityPub. It's like an intermediate layer.
GenshoTikamura
>This post was written by the Bonfire maintainers' circle and shaped by feedback from the advisory circle.
It is something about community, the sense of belonging, glorified bureaucracy, being slow, and good writing. A Kinfolk of software.
Relevant meme: "I took LSD last night and had this vision of a federated social network that will disrupt the world. Will you help bring it to fruition? I can't offer any money right now"
chobeat
It should be both: it's a toolkit with a lot of plugins already built-in to have some "flavours" out of the box.
I think it's like when they were saying "blockchain is a technology and bitcoin it's its first application" kind of thing.
metalman
it's a virtue signaling jargon bomb, cute puke, kinda thing that makes me want to kick kittins, buff!meeeeerrrrewww! whump!meerewwwerrrruuuu! just to attempt to highlight the absurdity...
ryukoposting
You couldn't waterboard this out of me.
snickerer
I did not understand what this is about from the article. It is social and wants to empower people, but how?
From reading the 'about' page I understood that this is a new social media platform in the Fediverse.
Now there is obviously one question: why should I participate in this and not in the existing projects like Mastodon? Why did you split up?
I suggest the Bonfire people should put the answer to that question on the top of the 'about' page.
chobeat
Why not participating in Mastodon? Because nobody really wanted a Twitter clone and the project is losing its momentum. Lemmy is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is less in absolute numbers.
Why using Bonfire? The first thing that comes up to me from the website is that this model of community-focused development seems more resilient to the wave of AI slop. A small Mastodon instance with 30-40 active people and limited federation would be useless. A Bonfire instance with the same people where you can work on community projects or scientific projects, sounds a lot more viable while keeping the shields up against the slop.
Xiol32
I see we still haven't learned to put a summary of what your product is/does near the start of any big announcement.
RadiozRadioz
Appears to be a fediverse social network like Mastodon, there's a demo on their homepage: https://bonfirenetworks.org/
chrz
Yes lost me reading after few minutes because I still didn't know what I was reading about
ebisoka
These sites are easy to figure out.
Go to Main Page
Scroll down to go to the "Code of Conduct"
Search on "Reverse"
Read
"Our community prioritises marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Moderators reserve the right not to act on complaints regarding:
‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia.’ or critiques of racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behaviors or assumptions."
Ask yourself if you want to be a part of a community of people that condones certain racism and sexism.
austin-cheney
Sigh. There is no such thing as reverse-isms.
For example discrimination based on race is racism, objectively. Creating a reverse-ism out of that subjectively singles out a particular identity to champion. An effective code of conduct would not mention such subjectivity in any form.
charlescearl
Racists will always find a way to make ending racism “illegal” (they write those “laws”). Love how the US Civil Rights Acts and various emancipation clauses always contain loopholes to re-enslave folk. Like using civil rights law - mostly constructed to make life for formerly enslaved Africans plausible - now being used to erase, incarcerate, unemploy, de-legitimize, kidnap, and perform deportation of the same folks it was intended to protect. It was never “color blind” because slavery was not “color blind” (the terms always re-inscribe the borders of racism and ableism don’t they?) Never trust colonizer “law” or “logic”. Rant done.
chobeat
bro, you posted cringe. This stuff was already edgy non-sense in 2016.
ebisoka
This is not my cringe, I'm just reposting the garbage from the Bonfire/op COC
aloisdg
What a long way to say that you don't understand Karl Popper
neuroelectron
Treating the symptoms and not the problem.
darkhorse13
Slightly unrelated maybe, but I'm really hoping that the https://once.com model would take off. That would be the change I would want to see in the software world. It's more simpler to understand than governance, public interest, etc. Just pay once and own the software. I really don't think software is that deep or has many philosophical implications.
RamblingCTO
But isn't that out of sync with reality? If I have to maintain software and put in more hours but only get paid once, I have to grow and grow and grow to keep getting paid. I'm actually developing a screen recording app for macos that's gonna be paid once, but will only have updates for a year. You can use it until apple changes APIs and whatever, but otherwise it wouldn't be a sustainable business model for me.
I think before we talk about being only paid once for software (which isn't a finished product like a brick anyway) we need to figure that out.
_Algernon_
This was solved before subscriptions took over everything by having to pay for new major versions. You pay once and have a limited duration of updates, after that you stick with the current version or pay again for the upgrade.
The benefit of doing it this way was that the user had a choice in upgrading which aligned incentives between users and developers. The developer had to deliver tangible improvements in order to keep payments from existing users coming. These days they change the color scheme every six months, remove features, change the UI for no dicernable reason and label the whole changelog "Various changes and bug fixes" when the product is clearly a mature product that should be in maintenance mode with no significant changes required.
johnny22
then there's no money for actual maintenance beyond that say a year.
darkhorse13
No I totally hear you, I don't even practice what I preach because I have a subscription-based side-project: https://forms.md
I guess I would like to see someone make the Once model work to great success. I don't know how you would deal with updates and stuff, but that's what I meant. One "simple" solution is just charging the LTV (or something that's close to it) as the one-time price.
quijoteuniv
Refreshing reading. I hope we soon move to an era where this kind of initiative is the starting point. (In opposition to the make quick money model)
RetroTechie
P2P everything, then.
To scale up to a billion+ users of [whatever], it's easier if every user controls their own data (and some of 'nearby' users) on their own devices. Logically you'd need P2P between those billion+ users to make that network as a whole work.
BUT: figuring out how to do that well, is hard. Doing that in centralized manner (centralized database, users are clients only, etc) is easier. And gives maximum control to whoever starts it.
Of course scaling that means big hosting / bandwidth costs, to recoup (and profit!), enter advertising & all the bad incentives that come with it.
Like you, I hope the ad-supported everything crap is just a transitional stage, and by-the-people, for-the-people becomes the norm.
But P2P services done well is hard. The struggles of crypto coins, (truly) decentralized file sharing, and would-be FB competitors are just a few examples.
xucian
there is a fine balance between new features and performance (e.g. android/ios apis, .net apis in unity game engine etc.)
but I think there's a consensus around certain software not keeping its responsiveness acceleration on par with hardware capability acceleration, some of it driven by ideas like "everyone phone now has 8gb of ram, c'mon", but most of it by profit incentives on the other side, e.g. cloud providers.
I was really happy to discover proxmox (my micro-homelab is a dell mini pc, a mid-range asus gaming router, a 2-slot synology nas, and it's rocking)
then, hetzner (for workloads that cannot be hosted on my homelab), they have an outstanding performance for 3-5$ monthly. before that I used aws lightsail, digital ocean droplets, and before that I used google cloud. I basically started with the worst and ended up with the best, I'm quite sad about that as I've wasted so many hours learning the stupid GCP ui, which was buggy and convoluted af. basically I went on one of the worst paths in terms of devops/sysadmin leverage, wasting time on semi-non-transferrable skills. this was not my main job, though, it was mostly hobby projects but still
xprn
In my opinion, it’s good to make these mistakes earlier rather than later on. You got the scars early enough to think there must be a better way, as opposed to starting with the “old school way” and then thinking that AWS/GCP would make it easier.
xucian
hm, I think I would've never gone with a cloud provider if I knew about these low-barrier self-hosting solutions.
it definitely helps to have scars, though. just pray something/someone takes you out of the pain soon enough (it took me ~4y to finally realize there has to be a better way at least for small/medium projects)
rapnie
I fail to see how your comment relates to the article or the Bonfire project. But maybe the general approach triggered you to post this. I am curious. Would you enlighten me?
seif_madc
Software is built by humans, for humans, and we should feel that, see that, when we are using it, and even when we are not using it, i mean the resposibility developers should take writing those lines of code, the moral side of things, the long term consequeces of their blind choices, genius evil algorithms, and yes developers and not managers or those people at "the top", because at the end of the day, the developer is the one giving it all to make that peace of software works, i told myself many times before that we have laready reached an era where software is built by machines for humans, long before A.I and vibe coding .
null
hackrmn
It caught my attention big time. All up until the point the word "caracul" was linked to the Zapatista movement, literally -- as in, to the Wikipedia page on Zapatista -- which, in turn says:
> is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico.[4][5][6][7]
I don't mean to preach political theory now, but as far as I can see we're already collectively pretty divided (divide and conquer comes to mind): for a project that seems to preach all manner of fairness and correction of a system gone wrong, and is arguably moderately anti-capitalist (in the sense of objecting some of the status-quo product of Silicon Valley's mode of operation), do we really need to be thrown all the way to the other end of the left-right scale? Is Bonfire arguing for the analogue of "militant revolution" of software?
Imagining the project now, I am envisioning green-clad militants writing "fair" software. While not without merit, in my opinion the explicit political associations detract from the intrinsic value something like Bonfire could have for us, who are indeed have never been more firmly under the boot of the commercial IT industry than now.
forinti
The way I read these capitalist/anti-capitalist debates is that those for capitalism usually have an idealized version of it in their heads and those against it have some very specific issue in mind.
In Latin America, there are many communities that have suffered because of specific capitalist ventures: a banana plantation, a copper mine, etc.
You have to acknowledge these things and offer a better version of capitalism if you want diminish this divide.
eadmund
Meanwhile, those who are for socialism usually have an idealised version of it in their heads and those against it have some very specific issue in mind.
People are funny.
itsanaccount
You seem to be recoiling from the idea of average people being armed and militant. Like its surprising or outside of normal.
Im going to assume you're a reasonable person and have been watching some news. You probably think like I do that its good for society to follow some laws and have some checks on different groups power.
Hows that working out right now? You know without meaningful militancy on one side of the political spectrum.
RamblingCTO
This project looks cool but seems to be more interested in their governance model/politics than actually building it? Lot's of handwavy references to socialist movements but not a lot of documentation?
I cannot figure out what Bonfire is.
- The homepage has a bunch of "Bonfire is...", but they don't tell me much about how Bonfire achieves any of those goals like to be a "commons".
- There's a codebase and documentation, but it comes in six different "flavours", although I can only really differentiate between two.
- Most of the FAQs just say "wip".
- It proudly states that there are no ads, no tracking, etc, but doesn't tell me what there are no ads on, or what isn't tracking me.
- It proudly states that it's federated, but as far as what it federates with, that's "wip".
I'm all for more federation, more data control, and experiments in social networking, but I'm a technical user and I have no idea what this is or does. It feels like in service of wanting to be as abstract and flexible, it maybe just doesn't solve any actual concrete problems.
If it's a toolkit with which to build social networks, that's great, but much of the documentation suggests that it's also a network itself, suggesting perhaps limited use as a toolkit. If it supports ActivityPub or AtProto, it really needs to come out and say that up front. "Bonfire is a framework for building custom AtProto based social networking applications" would be a great summary, or "Bonfire is a Mastodon alternative exploring the frontier of ActivityPub federated applications" would be great too.