Bonfire Social launches v1.0 with a crowdfunding campaign
Bonfire Social has officially launched as version 1.0, and with it, the team has also launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund continued maintenance and the next phase of development. The campaign seeks to build federated groups, events, governance tools, shared moderation systems, and end-to-end encryption, among other features.
The team describes Bonfire as open, community-first infrastructure, and their design is explicitly for communities rather than individual people. They are focused on collective governance, shared spaces, and tools for organising rather than just content sharing. The team describes this as a “third path” between blockchain’s emphasis on individual sovereignty and Big Tech’s centralisation, one that centers collective care and community autonomy. Bonfire sees a large role for community servers, and this is how they explicitly position their software. There is no flagship Bonfire server, and that is not something the developers aspire to either. The entire goal for Bonfire is to create a network of smaller interconnected communities, and have these communities collectively govern the Bonfire software they are using.
This community-focused philosophy is reflected in Bonfire’s technical architecture, which prioritises flexibility and local control. Bonfire takes a highly modular approach to building fediverse software. At its core is Bonfire a large set of software modules, called the Bonfire Toolkit. These modules all perform a small function of a social networking platform, there is a module that handles your social graph, a module that implements ActivityPub, a module that implements search, a module for a microblogging-like UI, and many more. A collection of modules is called a flavour. This is a selection of modules and settings that together form a complete package for a social platform. The Bonfire team currently has two flavours: Bonfire Social, and the Open Science Network. The Bonfire Social flavour is the social networking platform, that has microblogging as well as various other features. The Bonfire Social flavour is also what is now released as Bonfire Social 1.0, ready for people to start using. The Open Science Network flavour creates a social platform with features relevant to the science community, such as logging in wit ORCID or Zenodo, and support for creating and displaying DOIs. The next part is the server. A server admin picks a flavour to install, but can manually also make changes to the flavour. The Bonfire Social flavour comes with the Bonfire UI module, but a server admin can select a different UI module if they so desire, giving their Bonfire Social server a completely different UI.
These architectural choices enable Bonfire Social 1.0’s feature set, which gives communities and people high levels of control. Bonfire Social 1.0 includes several features that distinguish it from standard fediverse microblogging platforms. Circles function as private-by-default groups of people (such as “local friends” or “mutual aid crew”), each with their own dedicated feed showing posts from members. Custom feeds a simple interface to filter and sort by content type, date, engagement, and other parameters, then save these configurations as presets.
A single account can create multiple independent profiles, each with its own followers, content, and settings. Profiles can also be shared between users, enabling collaborative accounts for projects or organisations. The platform emphasises portability, allowing users to import posts (with or without replies) when migrating from another instance, and export or import their entire social data (follows, posts, blocks, etc), with a migration dashboard to make things clearer.
Bonfire is strongly focused on giving people full control over their social networking presence. For the developers, this means continually finding a balance between how to give people access to all the different options, while not overwhelming people. This tension is visible in the UI for creating posts, where people can define the boundaries for who can access and interact with a post on a highly granular detail.
Each item on this list has a further dropdown that give a person the option what group of people this setting applies to.
This explosion of granular settings makes default settings even more important, and the developers are keenly aware of this. They see a large role for server admins in this, who have a large number of options for setting default values, and can organise the default settings of their server in a way that aligns with the needs of their community.
The crowdfunding campaign outlines an ambitious development roadmap, with goals structured as progressive funding tiers. The foundational goal funds ongoing maintenance, security updates, performance improvements, and community support to ensure Bonfire remains reliable. Subsequent goals introduce major new features. Federated groups would enable communities to create shared spaces with their own rules, roles, and moderation that work across Bonfire instances and other ActivityPub platforms. An events and calendars system, developed in collaboration with LAUTI, would interoperate with Mobilizon, Gancio, and Gathio. Governance tools based on sociocracy and consent-based decision-making would provide everything from quick polls to deep deliberation, with transparent records and flexible methods.
The campaign also promises shared moderation infrastructure developed with IFTAS and other safety-focused organisations, allowing moderators to coordinate across instances. End-to-end encryption for direct messages and group chats would use the MLS standard, developed in partnership with the Social Web Foundation. ATProtocol/Bluesky bridges, built with A New Social (Bridgy Fed), would enable interoperability and migration between protocols.
The breadth of partnerships reflects Bonfire’s collaborative development model: each feature is being co-designed with organisations bringing domain expertise, from Princeton HCI’s research on collective governance to Co-op Cloud’s work on community hosting infrastructure. Whether Bonfire’s community-first approach will attract the communities it’s designed for remains to be seen, but the 1.0 release and crowdfunding campaign represent a significant bet that the fediverse needs infrastructure explicitly designed for collective organising rather than individual expression.
The News
UK activist group Media Revolution has launched Mo-Me, a new fediverse client, in collaboration with the Newsmast Foundation. The launch coincides with the group’s “Media Liberation Day” campaign targeting billionaire media ownership. The pitch of Mo-Me is editorially curated channels, rather than algorithmic or purely chronological feeds, with Newsmast providing the infrastructure while Media Revolution handles curation and moderation.
Mo-Me is fundamentally a fediverse client, that has been integrated with Newsmast’s channel.org to give users extra feeds (channels) to access. You can log in with your existing Mastodon account, or create an account on the Mo-Me server. If you log in with an existing Mastodon account, you see you a tab with your home timeline like any other Mastodon client. There are two additional tabs: a For You feed, with recommended posts, and a Channels tab, that gives a large variety of feeds/channels. It is unclear how the For You recommender algorithm works however. The channels tab mainly shows the channels created by Newsmast, which take in posts from the entire fediverse around topics like politics and climate change, with a set of filters and curation applied to it.
The modular nature of ActivityPub make it accessible for organisations like Media Revolution to not only criticise the current state of the media, but also present their own solutions. How this will impact their campaign and if people will start using the Mo-Me app remains to be seen. Mo-Me is available on iOS, Android and web.
The Social Web Foundation is hosting the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2026, similar to their event at last year’s FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a open source software event in Brussels, from January 31 to February 1, 2026, and features discussion tracks (“devrooms”) for a variety of different technology topics. The SWF is now inviting people to submit talks about the fediverse and ActivityPub. Last year’s Social Web Devroom was fully packed, and it’ll be exciting to see what people will be presenting in this edition.
Mastodon has officially launched version 4.5. The organisation has been slowly rolling out the new version with various release candidates, and it has been available for a while on the mastodon.social servers. With this official launch 4.5 is now available to everyone. The main features of 4.5 are quote posts, and the ability for servers to show missing replies. The features have showing up for a bit now in the fediverse, that’s why I’m not writing extensively about it now. Especially regarding quote posts I’m mainly interested in revisiting the topic after they’ve been out for a while. One of the main aspects holding back implementing quote posts was the fear of how they would change fediverse culture for the worse (via encouraging dunking), and it’ll be interesting to see in a while how quote posts have impacted fediverse culture in practice.
The latest update for Mastodon also comes with additional features for server admins. There is now the option to disable some of the live feeds (the local and federated timelines) for visitors and/or logged-in users. There are now also some additional moderation features, with better support for block specific usernames, as well as displaying additional context in the moderation interace.
The Links
- A video essay on algorithms in the fediverse, with an closer look at the FediAlgo project.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- A podcast interview with fediverse advocate Elena Rossini (podcast in French, transcript in English).
- The updated Loops app (the latest Loops version broke compatibility between the servers and the apps) is now avaiable as APK and on TestFlight. The apps are scheduled to be available in the stores next week.
- Lemmy Development Update October 2025
- A proposal (FEP) to represent torrents on ActivityPub.
- The Fireside Fedi show interviews Jesse Karmani, the developer of photo sharing app Frequency.
