Bonfire — build your community a world of its own

Announcing Bonfire for communities: groups and tools to organise together

Groups and topics, community rules and decision-making, events, organisation profiles, federated comments, custom themes: built with the communities who needed them, ready to use as-is, or to shape into a flavour of your community's own.

Communal Bonfires — Open Indie

Online community platforms are assembly-kits for large, communal bonfires, designed to draw people towards the light and into the warm to...

Bonfire

A federated social network for individuals and communities to design, operate and control their own digital lives.

Why Community Matters: Groups as the Next Step for the Fediverse

Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse. They'll live next to your personal feed, but each group having a specific purpose: a study circle, a lab team, an activist collective, a local mutual aid crew, a project team. Inside you’ll find posts, conversations, calendars, shared resources, and more. Crucially, groups will be portable and interoperable.

Making Community Governance Legible: A Semester with Bonfire

A collaboration with Princeton explores how Governance Cards can help communities explain how they organise, make decisions, and care for their shared spaces.

What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules? (Published 2018)

Life online can offer us a sense of belonging in any number of virtual villages. But the power to control those spaces isn’t very communal at all.

Thoughts on Communities | unDraw Blog

Even with the best intentions and people eager to join, most attempts to create communities fail and will continue to do so.

Building Welcoming Communities

Building a community that encourages people to use, contribute to, and evangelize your project.

Your Online Clubhouse

I’ve gotten in the habit of explaining Discourse to people as a clubhouse. A place on the Internet that belongs exclusively to you and your friends – whether you have 10 friends or a few hundred thousand.

The Atmosphere . Building the open social web

Creating a Flourishing Digital Public Space for Your Local Area | Notion

A how-to guide for admins and moderators of inclusive, uplifting, and public-spirited local Facebook groups, Discord servers, subreddits, and more...

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Permissioned Data Shapes: Community-Moderated Content - Nick's Blog

A community can own spaces the way a person does: a club's members post to each other under a dedicated community DID, with a feed space for content, a moderation space for notes, a labels space for filtering, and a single app view as the only window into any of it.