Bonfire: Building Modular, Consentful, and Federated Social Networks

Bonfire is an open-source, modular platform for creating federated social networks and communities that put users and groups in control. Bonfire’s architecture is designed to be deeply extensible: each instance can enable or disable features, adapt its onboarding, workflows, or governance, and even fork or create extensions or apps for their own needs.

This talk will showcase:

• Making federation easy for everyone: See how Bonfire enables developers to connect any new or existing app to the fediverse with much less effort, so these apps can instantly communicate and collaborate with other platforms just by plugging into our standards-based API (ActivityPub C2s).

• Live demos in action: We’ll demonstrate this approach with real examples, like creating and sharing events that connect seamlessly between the Lauti events app, Bonfire, and Newsmast's mobile apps. Resulting in a seamlessly integrated networked ecosystem. We’ll also present our work on secure, interoperable, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging.

• Bonfire's modular approach with extensions and "flavours" (collections of extensions and default settings) that adapt to diverse use cases, from research to activism to local news.

• Lessons learned from co-designing features with scientists, activists, and other diverse communities.

Whether you’re curious about building your own platform, adding ActivityPub to a new tool, or shaping the “next layer” of federated protocols (groups, moderation, decisionmaking, trust), Bonfire’s approach, code, and community offer a living experiment in interoperability and mutual care.

Links:
- Project - Docs - Code - Interop & FEP/Protocol extensions