Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

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.

>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"

"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.

A new federated protocol? or does this provide a different front end to an existing Federated system?

it's a set of plugins built on top of ActivityPub. It's like an intermediate layer.

Reminds me of Urbit. Maybe a HURD server, too.

> a federated social networking toolkit to customise and host your own online space and control your experience at the most granular level.

Bonfire social is built on it. https://bonfire.cafe is a Bonfire social instance. Looks very Mastodon. Here are some other apps built on Bonfire: https://bonfirenetworks.org/apps/

What is "it" though? It's hard to figure out from any of the About page, Design, or the README [1, 2, 3].

Only when getting to the Architecture [4] section much later in the docs, it starts mentioning ActivityPub, but still no useful description of the project - "an unusual piece of software" is the only provided bit. Is it a framework, a new protocol, a network? Looks like the former - an application to write ActivityPub based software, but I'm only 50% sure.

[1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/about/

[2] https://bonfirenetworks.org/design/

[3] https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html

[4] https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/architecture.html

Why are you so unsure about this - it explicitly says it's a framework?

The website reads like zombo.com except its not meant to be a joke.

I once saw some software from someone who claimed they had solved business software once and for all. What they actually had built was a CMS where the data types were also in the CMS alongside the instances of those types. Y'know, like most modern CMSs. Their point was that you could build anything in it because it was so flexible, but when pressed to give real-world examples they struggled.

Another teachable moment for me was when studying Haskell, realising that the fewer type restrictions you put on a function, the less the function could do. This was counter intuitive to me – surely with fewer restrictions you can do more! But no, with fewer restrictions you know less about what you've got, and so there's less you can do with the data. This comparison might be a bit of a reach.

In a similar vein, Bonfire seems to be trying to be all things to all people, a network, and a protocol, and the instance software, and a community, for Twitter-like, or Facebook-like, or other types of social networks. Maybe it is actually everything social in one project, but that doesn't tell me how to use it. Maybe it is actually just a generic function with no real type data, that therefore can't be used for anything specific.

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.

Thanks because I was wondering if I just wasn’t “in the know”. They should do a better job at marketing, especially since it’s relatively unknown.

docs seem pretty straightforward:

- Ember - social networking toolkit

- Social - fb/activitypub feed like

- Community - fb groups (wonder if they have voting based admin)

- Open Science - a peer review app?

- Coordination - ticket/kanban/w/e productivity software

- Cooperation - fb marketplace?

To reiterate what the earlier poster asked "what is it"? Are these 6 fully completed, polished, and ready to use applications? Are they ideas for applications? Are they PoC?

Best go ask their community engagement manager and head of product. I'm sure they'll guide you along.

We all - including you - know that's not going to happen; the onus is not on the customer to do this. Instead this project will fade into obscurity when the small group of advocates complete great school and get jobs in private industry

I was mostly making fun of everyone on this site reading my comment who presume non-capitalist ventures have such positions.

Don't include me in your prisoned worldview at the end of history. I'll point back to a similar comment on some dumb thing called Diaspora 15 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324161

And then to non-corporate sponsored queerfolk making ActivityPub, a terrible failure ignored and forgotten (/s), and then to all the various Fediverse apps, who would never ever compete with Twitter, on and on and on.

The slogan "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest", was coined in 1817. The Haymarket Riot was 1886. The Bull Moose Party's platform in 1912 included the 8 hour workday in its platform. It wasn't signed into law until 1933.

We haven't even began understanding as a society the importance of the digital commons and the need for communities to build their own online townsquare. Theres so much more to do.

they are modules of the system

These seem like guesses. From the descriptions on the website I would have said the first three are public style social networking and the latter three are a sort of collaboration thing closer to project management tools.

But I don’t know!

Are these mutually exclusive or can you run all at the same time? Can a “social” talk to a “community”? Is an “ember” actually able to do anything by itself? Can a “social” talk to a Mastodon instance?

The author was/is so consumed with virtue signaling they spend zero effort actually educating. It was a non stop lecture until I stopped reading, which is really too bad.

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