Hacker News Reader

Comment by antfarm | Hacker News Reader

"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.

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com