We’re delighted to share that our talk: “Sovereignty Is More Than a Server: Public Digital Commons with Bonfire” has been accepted for the Open Source Conference Luxembourg 🎉 !
We’re looking forward to discussing why digital sovereignty requires more than self-hosting and how public digital commons and projects like Bonfire Networks can help build more open, democratic, and resilient digital ecosystems.

If you’re attending, we’d love to meet you, exchange ideas, and learn about what you’re working on.<span class="invisible"> #digitalsovereignty #commons #bonfire

Shared infrastructure is how the #Fediverse can grow without recreating enshittified platform silos.

We’re excited to share that Bonfire is working with Mastodon on two critical areas of Fediverse infrastructure: remote media storage and automated content detection.

Built around open Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider (FASP) specifications, this work will help platforms connect to shared services instead of each having to build and operate the same capabilities alone.

Our aim is to make these capabilities open, interoperable, and available for any federated server to adopt.

A big thank you to @Mastodon@mastodon.social team for involving us in this work. We’re looking forward to building together and sharing what we learn along the way.

Read the full post: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bu...

#ActivityPub #FASP

We’re gathering around a fire 🔥

Around the Bonfire is our new newsletter: a digest of releases, community stories, collaborations, and everything else taking shape around Bonfire.

We’ll send it when there’s a new release, but never more than once a month. You can unsubscribe whenever you like.

The first edition is coming soon. Join us:

bonfirenetworks.org/subscribe

In solidarity with #AutisticiInventati.

Please join us in signing the open letter and send it to your representatives: inventati.org/campaign/open_...

A/I's mission has always been clear, and for more than twenty years it has inspired generations of hackers and activists in Italy and around the world: "Socializzare saperi senza fondare poteri." Sharing knowledge without establishing power.

That is what the US is attacking, and that is what is at stake today.

The premise of these sanctions, that whoever provides communications infrastructure answers for whatever anyone does with it, would criminalise and shut down most Big Tech platforms tomorrow if applied equally.

Instead it is aimed at grassroots services who refuse to surveil their users.

We condemn these sanctions, and we stand firmly with solidarity tech like A/I. Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism.

inventati.org/campaign

@cavallette@mastodon.bida.im

Bonfire 1.0.7 is out 🔥

It includes a new default UI, reworked discussions, faster and more flexible feeds, better mobile navigation, and fixes across federation, accessibility, publishing and admin tools.
We’re also sharing our bikemap for what’s next: public federated groups, better notifications and easier-to-find settings.
Want to help shape federated groups? We’re currently looking for pilot communities, get in touch!

Read the post: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/...

Discussion: bonfire.cafe/...

Turn your #Ghost publication into a thriving community with Bonfire.

Automatically import all your Ghost articles into dedicated Bonfire groups and topics while preserving the membership tiers you’ve already set up. Readers can sign in to your Bonfire instance with their Ghost account, then discuss, react to, and connect around your work all in one place.

It’s the natural next step for publications: moving beyond growing an audience to nurturing a community.

Read more about our Ghost integration bonfirenetworks.org/ghost/

Here's another neat Bonfire feature: organisation profiles.

You can create a shared profile for your co-op, collective, project, or any other organisation or team, and invite trusted people to manage it with you.

Each team member signs in with their usual Bonfire account, with no insecure sharing of passwords, and together they can post as the organisation, access its feeds and private messages, manage its settings, and add or remove other members.

It’s similar to managing a Facebook Page, but built for the #fediverse: one shared public identity, securely managed by multiple people.

A tiny Bonfire feature that we’ve grown quite fond of 🌱

Instance admins can define their own set of default avatars, which are randomly assigned to people who haven’t uploaded a profile picture yet.

It sounds like a very small thing and technically, it is.

But after experimenting with it on the Jacobin community, we noticed how much these little details can contribute to giving an instance its own visual identity and fostering a sense of belonging to a shared digital place.

Not every feature that shapes a community needs to be big. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of tiny avatars 😊

Read more about our work with Jacobin in our case study: bonfirenetworks.org/case-stu...

What should digital infrastructure for open science look like, and more importantly, who should shape it?

Universities and scholarly communities are starting to explore new directions together. This includes a living lab at Warwick, governance research with Princeton HCI and experiments with the Prosocial Design Network.

We invite more scientists, research communities and universities to join: experiment and study it, co-design what comes next, and help govern the Open Science Network.

bonfirenetworks.org/science#OpenScience #science