Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse. They’ll live next to your personal feed, but each group having a specific purpose: a study circle, a lab team, an activist collective, a local mutual aid crew, a project team. Inside you’ll find posts, conversations, calendars, shared resources, and more. Crucially, groups will be portable and interoperable.
Bonfire seems like a very good project, I like the philosophy behind it (beyond platforms, like some criticism raised recently), but it’s a bit concerning that none of the instances seem to have any active users: https://bonfire.fediverse.observer/list
Edit: found two:
I see Bonfire mentioned a lot on the fediverse report and elsewhere, but I still don’t understand what it is. I went to their website and it’s a wall of text that sounds like marketing. I don’t see a demo or a flagship instance.
Thanks for the sciety link. It looks like a half broken mastodon feed. So it’s a microblogging thing apparently?
I caught a lot of flak for a similar observation ages ago. Apparently I was the idiot because I wasn’t interested in parsing corporate waffle.
I found the demo instance: https://campground.bonfire.cafe/
Regarding the project itself, it’s supposed to be a mix of Mastodon/Piefed/Nextcloud
It kind of reminds of comments people made about “APub should not try to replicate corporate platforms, and just have the content available for everyone, then let the front-ends present it in different ways” in this thread: https://piefed.zip/c/fediverse/p/779852/is-pixelfed-sawing-off-the-branch-that-the-fediverse-is-sitting-on#post_replies
The execution however is less than ideal.
There is no flagship instance. I’m curious about bonfire too but, I’d like to be a regular user and try out how compatible it is with mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. Last time I checked the only bonfire instance that allowed signups didn’t have federation on.