Bonfire: Modular Communication Tools on the Open Social Web

Bonfire is a next-generation, open-source platform for building trustful communities and federated networks. It reimagines social communication by allowing communities to enable, disable, or adapt features and even protocols, putting community governance, and autonomy combined with consentful interconnection at its core. Bonfire federates with ActivityPub, with bridging available to ATproto (and hopefully more to come). Bonfire’s federated groups, thread-centric discussions, and modular architecture make it easy to experiment with new forms of moderation, identity, and trust that reach beyond single servers, single platforms, or single protocols.

This talk will cover:

• Our ongoing work and demo of fully end-to-end encrypted messaging (MLS-based) over ActivityPub, one the first two implementations of its kind

• ActivityPub C2S API use: how apps can easily integrate with the fediverse (including MLS messaging) via Bonfire

• Interoperability: extending ActivityPub for advanced user stories, moderation, as well as bridging with ATproto and potential future integrations with Matrix, XMPP, etc.

• Consentful communication flows and privacy-preserving tools for trust and safety (such as circles and boundaries)

• Bonfire’s modular architecture: designing “app flavours” with custom governance, moderation, and communication tools for different community needs

Attendees will see a live demo and leave with ideas and tools for composing their own modular, federated, and privacy-focused social communication spaces.

Links:

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