Bonfire Networks is a tiny software org that has spent the past couple of years building a framework for communities on the open social web. At the end of last week, they released Bonfire Social, a microblogging app. Like Mastodon, Bonfire Social runs on ActivityPub, but it takes differently opinionated approach to sociability. Out of the box, Bonfire Social offers:

  • Custom feeds, which work a bit differently from the ones on ATProto/Bluesky.
  • Ye Olde LiveJournal-style privacy and visibility controls, including group-based visibility and feeds with Circles and extremely granular controls for who can see, reply to, and otherwise interact with posts using Boundaries.
  • Full portability between instances, including migration of all posts, follows, circles, and bookmarks.

This is good. These are features I (and many others) have been advocating for in fediverse software for years, often while people explained at length that such things simply could not be implemented.

Most exhilarating to me, though, is that they aren’t just building another microblogging app. They’re making a toolkit for internet community software that is healthy and good and designed around real human needs from the start. As they put it in their crowdfunding campaign, they’re making building blocks for communities on the open social web.

An example of what you can do with the blocks: Bonfire’s Open Science community project is in beta now and was co-designed with working scholars to build something that served them, specifically. It’s designed to integrate scholarly data and federates with ActivityPub and ATProto/Bluesky out of the box, for instance, to meet scientists and other researchers and academics where they are.

What if we could

I am a scavenger by nature and I am committed to using the many imperfect tools we can reach to accomplish the ends we need. But what if we actually could have undiluted good at the center of our tooling, rather than piecing them together from the offcuts of the growth-first capital-tech complex?

I find the question hard to look at. I talk a pretty good game about what we need, and I believe what I say. Still: Hope? Mmmm. I have, like many of us, seen some shit. I find it hard to believe in the promise of software to do just about anything good for very long when it’s rooted in the social and cultural frameworks and incentives that got us here. It’s surprisingly hard to imagine that we might have network tools that are built different, for real.

The parallels to electoral politics in the context my country is living through are eyeroll-obvious. We had an election here last week, and the lesser-of-two-evils party swept the board. This is much better than the other possible future, but the Democratic party itself, an electoral-only machine given to contemptuous short-term exploitation of its base, is nowhere near what we need it to be.

So the thing that gave me actual hope was the outlier—the triumph of a campaign in New York that focused relentlessly on the needs of ordinary humans, that refused to surrender anyone’s humanity, and that built a new kind of cohort of politically revitalized volunteers. Those volunteers knocked on three million doors and, with their energy and sincerity, persuaded more than a million New Yorkers to feel enough hope to try something new.

If the Mamdani administration succeeds—and I think they will—it will be as much because of the 100,000-person strong political community they built as any behind-the-scenes negotiations. And success won’t look only like policy wins, either—it will also be redefinition of what it means to be part of the life of a place you love. All glorious-future and new-dawn rhetoric aside, the kind of participation the campaign achieved can be transformational. Once you’ve seized the tools of political life to build communal power, it’s hard to forget what a hammer feels like in your hand.

We need tools that are structurally up to the task, on purpose. Very much including the tools we use to find each other, organize, communicate, and sustain ourselves. This is why Bonfire matters, and why I try to help out with their work whenever I can.

Audre Lorde had it right from the beginning. Wielded well, the master’s tools can maybe be used to smash a few deserving walls, as we saw in past two decades’ political and social revolutions. But like patient little demons, those tools carry inside them the spirit of their making. They twist in our hands in our moment of need and leave us blistered and bleeding. By serving the needs of the people who made them, they resist the greater work.

We need better tech. We need it to be made in better ways and for better uses, and above all, in and for communities.

The Bonfire team takes its inspiration directly from Ursula K. Le Guin—and I know that not just because I watched their video, which is a Pythonesque delight, but because I’ve heard them use Le Guin’s ideas in our conversations for years. They have chosen to work with artists and archivists and scientists rather than the structures of capital investment. They are, I think, another whole thing.

The work that comes next for Bonfire—that their funding campaign is about—evolves around the needs of real humans in our exact moment, including collective governance, shared moderation, mutual aid networks, living archives, and end-to-end encryption. It also, to my absolute delight, foregrounds maintenance—the thing no institutional funder ever wants to help with, because the incentives are for the innovative and new, not the stable and thriving. The code is open source, yes, but it’s all specifically conceived as a public good. And it’s all being built outside the US, thank god.

The fact that Ivan and Mayel and their many collaborators have brought the work this far is a testament to their own unswerving commitment but also to the way these tools ignite hope in the communities they were built to serve. The moment has arrived for those of us who genuinely believe that we shape our tools and then our tools shape us to fuel the forge. The campaign to support Bonfire’s next steps has real momentum, too—only a few days in, they’re already approaching 70% of their goal.

I’ll leave this on a note in Mamdani’s speech last Tuesday that made me holler out loud:

…if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.

Let’s go.

Notes

I wanted just sparks for this post’s feature image to go with the post title’s little snippet of the Book of Job, and I didn’t want them to be wildfire sparks so I looked outside my usual government archive zone. Thanks to Toa Heftiba for the sparks from which I cropped the image.

Thank you always to the folks who steadfastly supporting my work here and with the various network projects I work on. If you appreciate what I do and you can, please consider joining up or kicking a few dollars my way—it all helps.