Bonfire – working to build safer, more open federated tools and communities
bonfirenetworks.org
bonfirenetworks.org
I might be wrong, but this feels kind of like a fusion of Mastodon + Nextcloud. Meaning that you have a social/federation-first framework that allows you easily build apps on top of the framework that extend the ecosystem (similar to the way that Nextcloud apps can be easily written and deployed on a Nextcloud server and can integrate with various server features and interoperate with other apps).
It seems like this could be really cool! It could help fix one of the current challenges I see in the fediverse which involves a splintering of accounts that you post from. For example, I often see organizations with accounts for both Mastodon and PeerTube. It seems like Bonfire would possibly allow for for a single account that can be used both on a "social" app and on a "video" app....
don't know why people create multiple accounts, peeertube has had sign in from fediverse for a long time now
The biggest marketing failure in the fediverse is that people still think that an instance determines your reach. They think of instances as subreddits, not as email servers.
I'd like to understand it, but haven't really felt like I grasped it after reading short descriptions.
Now, you can interact with any mastodon account, just like you can send an email to anyone anywhere.
Now, here is the fun part. if there is a peertube video you want to comment on. Instead of creating a new account, you can just "sign in from fediverse" and your comment will be posted on a peertube video. Also, lets say you have a peertube channel you want to follow. normally you would have to create an account (like a youtube account) and have all the videos followed in your mastodon feed itself.
Same for following someone from pixelfed and commenting on their photo. How about if you want to listen to a funkwhale like for example this random person https://open.audio/@jayrope@open.audio/
if you follow with your mastodon or pleroma or bonfire or misskey account, their new upload will show in our timeline...
The two best clients for it that are still actively developed are Planetery and Manyverse.
1) Can someone who is already famous, ex: some TV political pundit, join the network and quickly leverage the networks strengths to acquire a following. EVEN if that acquisition happens out-of-network. For example: let's say bonfire has 100 million users, it's a problem if someone famous can say "follow me on bonfire" and get 10 million followers in a week. While I understand this is a very high bar, any solutions to this problem (regardless of their implementation), will require people to know eachother personally in a non-scaleable way.
2) Can someone who is not famous, ex: a conspiracy theorist, gain a following by posting controversial/clickbait things. Ie there can be any algorithmic feedback loop of consumption (views/likes/follows) fueling viral growth.
IMHO, if the answer to either of those is yes, you are fighting a losing battle.
It is bad if a network, like Facebook, has a large user base where it is attractive/valueable/helpful to someone who can know gain a larger following simply by joining (and getting people to voluntarily follow them). The network itself has value and people are able to exploit that value.
Look at this example in comparison to the alternative - that political pundit launching their own network. They can say “hey, go join my social network which I just created!”. I firmly believe they should be entitled todo that and people should be able to voluntarily signup/follow them on that new network. But that is a much much harder task to build/operate/scale then simply joining yet another social network and tapping into the user base.
Usually Fediverse type platforms just use reverse chronological order (or similar as options) with no "algorithm" for personalized content recommendations. Bonfire explicitly states such in their FAQ.
That's the one thing that was typically missing from open social networks aiming to displace Facebook. I still remember when relationships were "official on Facebook," and I'm sure some of that psychology persists (however subtly) and is one reason that Facebook just wont die.
I'll definitely be setting up an instance for my family, maybe I can get them all to finally kick the habit.
Or please start up a primarily English instance.
They built a business model that relies on network effects and then deliberately killed the network effect during the adoption phase.
If Elon Musk takes over and removes this Twitter censorship and deals with the bot issue, more people will stay on with Twitter rather than opt for alternate platforms.
The other problem with Twitter, for a different but specific segment of its users, is that it doesn't ban enough users and remove enough posts.
If Musk changes Twitters content moderation policy, Users from column A will be happier, and users from column B will be less happy.
I believe there are a lot more people in Column B than A.
Rule #37 of Doing Business: Don't use language that is vague and open to wildly different interpretations in your public advertising as to why people should use your product. Save that for the Terms of Service.
I shouldn’t have to to think about dopamine and capitalism when I’m looking for a social network; on the other hand I do, kind of, but being introduced to software or a service shouldn’t be presented as such an emotional experience as I think it is.
I have long divorced myself from the consumption of film, games and music; so when it’s understood that without the presentation of an emotional experience the appeal of these three things would effectively be neutralized, I’m fine with that.
My observations are less targeted at software as an art form. I think it’s more about how it’s being marketed and what the effectiveness of a software’s marketing suggests about its targeted audience.
I would be more interested in Bonfire if they had a plain web page that just said for example, “Bonfire is a social networking service that can communicate with the ActivityPub protocol and does X, Y, Z and we are working on W. We named it Bonfire because bonfires are like quaint parties but with a raging flame in the middle of it.”
To summarize, maybe I prefer certain software that advertises itself plainly by its merits than…I guess more “psycho-social” sort of attributes?
That said, I don't see the point of divorcing media-like software (by which I mean at least video games and social media, like Bonfire, and possibly other types of software) from its emotional content. Just as the entire point of a movie or a record is basically only its emotional content, the entire point of using social media software is the emotional content of the interactions with others, right? And, if the emotion is the point of the software, why is it out of bounds to advertise it with that slant? Movie trailers and novel jackets are entirely emotional in their language. Are those somehow bad or immoral?
Or are you simply saying that emotional marketing of software isn't to your personal taste?
Perhaps it’s out of bounds because it’s unrealistic. A social network is neither film nor novel. Maybe the issue is that we are talking about how software appeals emotionally to real people where they will engage in real communications with real consequences with the emotional appeal of movie trailers, video games and novels.
Ironically the tone that the advertisement of Bonfire for example reminds me of is reminiscent of those fake ads from games like Fallout 3 or Bioshock. They’re almost employing the exact sort of rhetoric that people who try to make a world a better place before shoving everyone down tubes beneath the ocean and sticking needles in their arm use.
Is it fair when a social network like Gab or Truth Social behaves the same way?
Or is software with contrived emotional slants only acceptable when it appeals to your own personal views?
Movies and social interactions carry emotions. Social media can (should?) carry social interactions, but why should social media itself be the source of emotions? Can it not be neutral in emotions and 'just' carry social interactions with emotions?
The closest thing we have to a neutral "common carrier" in social media -- if we stretch the definition of social media -- is probably email, but even the choices made there over its decades-long rollout have emotional consequences. Furthermore, the emotional content of checking my inbox on my phone in the waiting room at the tire shop is different than blasting through it with mutt on my Ubuntu desktop, and is different again when I log into my webmail quick on my parents' elderly Dell desktop.
IMO if we try to pretend that there is a clear separation between the medium and the message, then in using these apps we open ourselves up to an even deeper level of emotional manipulation than using them with that truth in mind.
True. Being neutral is a nice goal, but unachievable. Every choice has a color, some dull, some bright, but colored nonetheless.
Antidepressants advertised using solarpunk cartoons of diverse people growing organic produce in a city park with wind turbines in the background. Everybody dressed in pastel colors, while the plants are neon green.
> being introduced to software or a service shouldn’t be presented as such an emotional experience as I think it is.
I found/experienced this when I was writing my own texts/content for a project/startup of mine. There was something pulling on me to write in a more emotional tone and I had to actively cut it back and get more to the point, just call it what it is. A good example is the first sentence of this paragraph; the word before the slash is what I think and the word after the slash is what I initially wrote down. I didn't "found" anything, I had to "experience" it. It's not a "project", but a "startup". I guess I'm influenced by western culture in general and HN-like culture specifically.
Is this also what you mean? Am I close? I guess I feel what you mean, but it's hard to put it into words.
I’m beginning to feel like the way that the Western world expresses itself is at its hyperbolic peak and it’s exposing a lot of our insecurities.
I do immediately recognize that a product is being offered in some fashion, but it’s more about how it’s being offered, as if it is something ostensibly, potentially life-changing. I think there a few HN members who know that there are plenty of products shown on HN that use emotionally jarring language that dances around the fact that the product is something that functionally is not as enigmatic as it’s advertised.
There is plenty of something else mixed in there also, but if you can’t tell I’m working off of a hunch right now. I would need to sit down and do a concentrated analysis to get everything that I feel across to you, if I ever had the chance to do so.
As a personal sidenote: I quite like the woodcut aesthetic generally and the design shift combined with the evocative imagery does more for me than the typical Meta- or Google-style branding.
There needs to be a word that means "I almost thought what you were proposing sounded reasonable, until you said that last thing, and now I've lost all confidence."
Money yes markets ish. A pillar of capitalism is the private ownership of capital, without private ownership many markets no longer exist (talking the economic definition of 'market').
The real estate market would probably look much different and may even dissolve entirely if you forbid private ownership of real estate capital. I don't think this is a groundbreaking insight, I'm just clarifying for those who are careless about their use of words.
Seeing this phrase used over and over after Brexit is so funny.
WTF is this sentence? And post-capitalist?
Would you prefer "Post-ad-driven-, post-for-profit-, post-data-mining social media world" be preferable? I think we can agree that profit-maximalism has thoroughly fucked-up social media. Bonfire aims to buck that trend.
bit of irony it's posted to a VC ran forum, bet they'd take funding too.