Announcing Bonfire for communities: groups and tools to organise together

Explore<br>Explore what your community could build.

Features BUILD<br>Building blocks your community can combine.

Comparison table COMPARE<br>How Bonfire differs from other community platforms.

Case studies STORIES<br>How communities are shaping Bonfire for their needs.

About Bonfire ABOUT<br>The project, principles, and people behind it.

Try Bonfire at the campground ↗<br>Launch your Bonfire<br>Choose how much you want to run yourself.

Self-host DIY<br>Your infrastructure and some sysadmin comfort.

Cooperative hosting HOST<br>Your own space without a sysadmin job.

Co-design with us WITH<br>For communities, organisations and funders with specific needs.

Compare all three routes →<br>Ecosystem<br>Find people, answers, and tools around Bonfire.

Participate JOIN<br>Contribute, collaborate, or help sustain the commons.

FAQs ASK<br>Licensing, federation, privacy, and governance.

Documentation DOCS<br>Setup guides and technical reference for hosts and builders.

Browse the source code ↗<br>Blog<br>Get started

Today we're shifting our centre of gravity: from social features to community tools.

Bonfire was never meant to be one more feed that grabs your attention. Today it takes the shape we've been building toward: Bonfire for communities . A tool for groups that need to organise together, not just post at each other. Shipping today: groups and topics, events, shared organisation profiles, embeddable federated comments, customisable themes, and a first set of governance tools . It comes as a ready-to-use space with everything included, to then be reshaped block by block: add what's missing, swap or fork what almost fits, switch off what you don't need.

Why community comes first #

When Bonfire Social reached 1.0 in November last year, it delivered a polished, locally-governed, federated social app where people control their feeds, their boundaries, and who can reach them. Some spaces may stick to that (with individuals following each other and sharing not much more than a server), and we'll keep maintaining it for them.

But social was step one of a longer plan. While open source tools for decision making, events, or mutual aid have existed for years, they struggle because they sit apart from where people like to talk. Built into a social space instead, alongside the people you already follow, your groups and your feeds, the same tools gain the everyday pull that keeps communities on the big platforms. And those relationships belong to you: every tool shares them, and they travel with you across the open web.

A year with real communities confirmed it. Nobody came to us asking for a better microblog. They came wanting to give their community a home. A magazine whose readers wanted to debate each other, not just the articles. A mental health network that needed spaces where people could speak safely. A town that wanted its events, its announcements, and its discussions in a place that's locally governed. In every case the feed was the least interesting part of the answer.

Feeds are built around individuals: fine for chatter and discovery, but the wrong shape for organising. When you need specific people to see something, act on it, and follow through, you need a group: with membership, with rules, with a calendar, with a way to decide things together.

It's the same argument we made when we put groups on the crowdfunding roadmap, and now we're confident enough to make community the centre of the project .

Main community features #

These features are available today as 1.0 beta : ready to use and already running in real communities, though groups are not yet federating between instances. Consider it an invitation for more communities to shape these building blocks into whatever each of them actually needs. Want to poke at it first? Groups and everything else below are now live on the campground, our open testing instance.

Groups and topics #

In Bonfire, groups are spaces where communities, organisations, and teams can define their own membership, permissions, and rules. Because they're built on our flexible boundaries system, a group can take whatever shape you need: you can run a public group, an announcement-only space, a private invite-only room, or a group visible only to a particular circle. You're free to change your mind later when the group evolves.

Additionally, topics live inside groups and keep conversations from geting lost in one undifferentiated stream. You can follow a group or a single topic, so updates reach your feed without you having to visit every group page to check if there's anything new.

Two notes for the fediverse-curious: groups and topics are local-only for now (while we work out how to make them interoperable with other apps), and they can take different shapes from threadiverse groups. More details in the FAQ below.

Community rules #

Every space needs shared expectations. Both servers and individual groups can define their own community...