Slow software for a burning world
bonfirenetworks.org170 points by todsacerdoti 4 days ago
170 points by todsacerdoti 4 days ago
I cannot figure out what Bonfire is.
- The homepage has a bunch of "Bonfire is...", but they don't tell me much about how Bonfire achieves any of those goals like to be a "commons".
- There's a codebase and documentation, but it comes in six different "flavours", although I can only really differentiate between two.
- Most of the FAQs just say "wip".
- It proudly states that there are no ads, no tracking, etc, but doesn't tell me what there are no ads on, or what isn't tracking me.
- It proudly states that it's federated, but as far as what it federates with, that's "wip".
I'm all for more federation, more data control, and experiments in social networking, but I'm a technical user and I have no idea what this is or does. It feels like in service of wanting to be as abstract and flexible, it maybe just doesn't solve any actual concrete problems.
If it's a toolkit with which to build social networks, that's great, but much of the documentation suggests that it's also a network itself, suggesting perhaps limited use as a toolkit. If it supports ActivityPub or AtProto, it really needs to come out and say that up front. "Bonfire is a framework for building custom AtProto based social networking applications" would be a great summary, or "Bonfire is a Mastodon alternative exploring the frontier of ActivityPub federated applications" would be great too.
>This post was written by the Bonfire maintainers' circle and shaped by feedback from the advisory circle.
It is something about community, the sense of belonging, glorified bureaucracy, being slow, and good writing. A Kinfolk of software.
Relevant meme: "I took LSD last night and had this vision of a federated social network that will disrupt the world. Will you help bring it to fruition? I can't offer any money right now"
"Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online."
https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html
Further down the page it says it is built in Elixir with Phoenix/LiveView and PostgreSQL.
A new federated protocol? or does this provide a different front end to an existing Federated system?
it's a set of plugins built on top of ActivityPub. It's like an intermediate layer.
> a federated social networking toolkit to customise and host your own online space and control your experience at the most granular level.
Bonfire social is built on it. https://bonfire.cafe is a Bonfire social instance. Looks very Mastodon. Here are some other apps built on Bonfire: https://bonfirenetworks.org/apps/
What is "it" though? It's hard to figure out from any of the About page, Design, or the README [1, 2, 3].
Only when getting to the Architecture [4] section much later in the docs, it starts mentioning ActivityPub, but still no useful description of the project - "an unusual piece of software" is the only provided bit. Is it a framework, a new protocol, a network? Looks like the former - an application to write ActivityPub based software, but I'm only 50% sure.
[1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/about/
[2] https://bonfirenetworks.org/design/
I once saw some software from someone who claimed they had solved business software once and for all. What they actually had built was a CMS where the data types were also in the CMS alongside the instances of those types. Y'know, like most modern CMSs. Their point was that you could build anything in it because it was so flexible, but when pressed to give real-world examples they struggled.
Another teachable moment for me was when studying Haskell, realising that the fewer type restrictions you put on a function, the less the function could do. This was counter intuitive to me – surely with fewer restrictions you can do more! But no, with fewer restrictions you know less about what you've got, and so there's less you can do with the data. This comparison might be a bit of a reach.
In a similar vein, Bonfire seems to be trying to be all things to all people, a network, and a protocol, and the instance software, and a community, for Twitter-like, or Facebook-like, or other types of social networks. Maybe it is actually everything social in one project, but that doesn't tell me how to use it. Maybe it is actually just a generic function with no real type data, that therefore can't be used for anything specific.
It should be both: it's a toolkit with a lot of plugins already built-in to have some "flavours" out of the box.
I think it's like when they were saying "blockchain is a technology and bitcoin it's its first application" kind of thing.
Thanks because I was wondering if I just wasn’t “in the know”. They should do a better job at marketing, especially since it’s relatively unknown.
docs seem pretty straightforward:
- Ember - social networking toolkit
- Social - fb/activitypub feed like
- Community - fb groups (wonder if they have voting based admin)
- Open Science - a peer review app?
- Coordination - ticket/kanban/w/e productivity software
- Cooperation - fb marketplace?
These seem like guesses. From the descriptions on the website I would have said the first three are public style social networking and the latter three are a sort of collaboration thing closer to project management tools.
But I don’t know!
Are these mutually exclusive or can you run all at the same time? Can a “social” talk to a “community”? Is an “ember” actually able to do anything by itself? Can a “social” talk to a Mastodon instance?
To reiterate what the earlier poster asked "what is it"? Are these 6 fully completed, polished, and ready to use applications? Are they ideas for applications? Are they PoC?
Best go ask their community engagement manager and head of product. I'm sure they'll guide you along.
We all - including you - know that's not going to happen; the onus is not on the customer to do this. Instead this project will fade into obscurity when the small group of advocates complete great school and get jobs in private industry
I was mostly making fun of everyone on this site reading my comment who presume non-capitalist ventures have such positions.
Don't include me in your prisoned worldview at the end of history. I'll point back to a similar comment on some dumb thing called Diaspora 15 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1324161
And then to non-corporate sponsored queerfolk making ActivityPub, a terrible failure ignored and forgotten (/s), and then to all the various Fediverse apps, who would never ever compete with Twitter, on and on and on.
The slogan "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest", was coined in 1817. The Haymarket Riot was 1886. The Bull Moose Party's platform in 1912 included the 8 hour workday in its platform. It wasn't signed into law until 1933.
We haven't even began understanding as a society the importance of the digital commons and the need for communities to build their own online townsquare. Theres so much more to do.
The author was/is so consumed with virtue signaling they spend zero effort actually educating. It was a non stop lecture until I stopped reading, which is really too bad.
I did not understand what this is about from the article. It is social and wants to empower people, but how?
From reading the 'about' page I understood that this is a new social media platform in the Fediverse.
Now there is obviously one question: why should I participate in this and not in the existing projects like Mastodon? Why did you split up?
I suggest the Bonfire people should put the answer to that question on the top of the 'about' page.
There isn't really a Fediverse. There's Mastodon, Mastodon-compatible software, Lemmy, and Lemmy-compatible software - often colloquially referred to as the Fediverse. And then, there's everything else, including federated technologies which aren't one of the above, such as the web, email, and RSS.
If Bonfire isn't compatible with Mastodon or Lemmy it doesn't fit into the former category.
(Anyone who's tried to implement ActivityPub knows it's a lie. You implement Mastodon Protocol or Lemmy Protocol. If you follow ActivityPub you'll be alone on your own new protocol)
Why not participating in Mastodon? Because nobody really wanted a Twitter clone and the project is losing its momentum. Lemmy is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is less in absolute numbers.
Why using Bonfire? The first thing that comes up to me from the website is that this model of community-focused development seems more resilient to the wave of AI slop. A small Mastodon instance with 30-40 active people and limited federation would be useless. A Bonfire instance with the same people where you can work on community projects or scientific projects, sounds a lot more viable while keeping the shields up against the slop.
> Lemmy is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is less in absolute numbers
This is so true, I've had to put a timer on how much I can use it as I'm addicted like the old school reddit days
I think all it'll take is reddit messing up and lemmy.world might be the new front page of the internet
Reddit really messed up a couple of years ago with the killing off of 3rd party apps and u/spez generally being entirely out of touch, that made such an impact that to this day whenever I find a reddit thread on something I usually see a comment along the lines of "contents deleted in protest".
That permanently lost me from reddit, I tried kbin.social for as long as it was up and I really liked using it. I never really got on with lemmy for some reason. The outcome ended up being me just not using reddit like things, and I really don't miss it that much.
Highly recommend Lemmy, the people who make it are a bit iffy but it definitely gives old school reddit vibes https://lemmy.world/
These sites are easy to figure out.
Go to Main Page
Scroll down to go to the "Code of Conduct"
Search on "Reverse"
Read
"Our community prioritises marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Moderators reserve the right not to act on complaints regarding:
‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia.’ or critiques of racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behaviors or assumptions."
Ask yourself if you want to be a part of a community of people that condones certain racism and sexism.
Sigh. There is no such thing as reverse-isms.
For example discrimination based on race is racism, objectively. Creating a reverse-ism out of that subjectively singles out a particular identity to champion. An effective code of conduct would not mention such subjectivity in any form.
Racists will always find a way to make ending racism “illegal” (they write those “laws”). Love how the US Civil Rights Acts and various emancipation clauses always contain loopholes to re-enslave folk. Like using civil rights law - mostly constructed to make life for formerly enslaved Africans plausible - now being used to erase, incarcerate, unemploy, de-legitimize, kidnap, and perform deportation of the same folks it was intended to protect. It was never “color blind” because slavery was not “color blind” (the terms always re-inscribe the borders of racism and ableism don’t they?) Never trust colonizer “law” or “logic”. Rant done.
Reverse isms are just a more specific type of an ism - instead of being wielded by a privilege group against the historically marginalized, it’s the reverse.
I do agree that it’s unkind to treat those two isms differently, or to condone one while tolerating the other - but pretending that there’s not such thing as the ‘reverse’ case seems silly, when it’s so easy to define and easy to IRL.
Yeah, I understand the intent, but it’s still a bullshit play for identity politics. I so completely hate identity politics. Objectively speaking, the reverse of racism is no racism.
Ironically, its also an attitude that assumes everyone taking part is from certain groups. Most importantly, that everyone is from the west so racism is predominantly something white people do.
Their inclusivity assumes the unchallenged dominance of their own culture.
As someone who is not white and not entirely western I find it very off putting.
Here's a salient little exercise for you: if you had to "steelman" this position, this prioritising of "marginalised peoples safety" and (optional) deprioritising of moderating "reverse-isms", how would you do it? Try to make a case for this position you take such umbrage with
While steelmanning is a great practice, it sometimes feels a bit unfair that many positions are not allowed to be steelmanned (socially or otherwise).
Hm, what does this say about the site in general? I understand that you disagree with the moderation guideline choices, but how does this "figure out" the whole site in your mind?
What a long way to say that you don't understand Karl Popper
What should I understand about Karl Popper?
Popper coined the "paradox of tolerance"—that, in order to remain tolerant, a society cannot tolerate everything; in particular, it cannot show tolerance toward those who are intolerant, as their normalization inevitably leads to the demise of toleration in the public sphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
We all have to be prepared to bite our tongues in order to make the world worth living in, but it has to be a negative feedback system—those who fail to restrain themselves must (at some point) be censured for the sake of the commons. We can argue all day about how much grumbling should be permitted before we issue the rebuke, but total individual freedom invariably destroys society; it's a tragedy of the commons.
Isn't the reference and context backwards here?
As in, the "you should read Popper" comment was in response to somebody saying they though opting out of moderation/censorship was not good. I think Popper would broadly agree with this, and say that moderating out racism, transphobia etc is essential for good discourse.
This is all unfounded obviously, since Popper didn't ever use or write about social media.
Ah, an easy misunderstanding to make. The initial comment by ebisoka was not, in fact, in praise of moderation. The dog-whistle is the word "certain" near the end—insinuating that the Bonfire policy is to tolerate "racism and sexism" so long as it comes from minorities and is directed at the majority, following a quotation from the policies about how moderators may elect to ignore complaints of discrimination or inflammatory remarks when they are directed at majoritarian identities.
The CoC provides a justification for this decision—which, to elaborate on its rather simple framing, is that offensive rhetoric directed at minorities is qualitatively different from its inverse because it can incite racial violence and control the Overton window.* ebisoka doesn't consider this a worthy reason for the site's policies to admit to a biased moderation policy, but it's a deliberate nuance in the design that isn't captured in a simple description of the paradox of tolerance. (It's not an entirely problem-free policy, but the moderators aren't being instructed to ignore all abuse directed at majoritarians, just to be selective in what they tolerate. Antipathy is not quite the same as intolerance.)
Note also that ebisoka began the post with "these sites are easy to figure out," which suggests there is a multiplicity of sites like Bonfire that can be summarized (and therefore dismissed) purely on the basis of their Codes of Conduct. It's a fishing expedition for instances of affirmative action.
ebisoka put a lot of work into ensuring that post would slip by the radar for the average reader, but it's basically the same pattern of euphemisms that is guiding the Right's current crusade against DEI.
* Some strings attached. 1) Not as true in pluralistic societies or societies with near-equal splits; mostly a problem when the dominant group is vastly larger than the others. Hence other commenters remarking that this is a West-centric policy. 2) At the extreme end of the spectrum are places like South Africa and Zimbabwe, where the lingering populations of lower-class white people are subject to the double-whammy of lack of representation or advocacy in society and government, plus being the targets of resentment over colonialism.
ebisoka clearly came here to sow discord and pit groups of people against each other. Their comment history is very clear on that. What's really sad is that people took the bait right away.
I see we still haven't learned to put a summary of what your product is/does near the start of any big announcement.
They kind of have, because their product is not a thing, but a social environment.
I like people like this and admire their purpose, but they often don't make anything but manifestos. I make stuff, and I'm friends with other people who are sympathetic with this sort of thing and also make stuff.
Periodically we all make stuff and give it out to people, which in its own way helps cool the burning world, I guess. And folks like this make another manifesto when the previous ones didn't get people like me and my friends to lay down our tools and go to work for them.
It's a challenge, sort of. By which I mean: if the job is to get lots of things made, not so much. But if the job is to think this stuff out, well they're doing more of that than I am. I don't get a lot of help, or seek it: I'm focussed on what is waiting to be done within my jurisdiction. That's a limiting factor, but it serves my purposes :)
Appears to be a fediverse social network like Mastodon, there's a demo on their homepage: https://bonfirenetworks.org/
but what kind? Microblogging, macroblogging, link aggregation, forum, imageboard etc.
there are plugins for all of this stuff and more: there are kanban boards, stuff for openscience (I think peer-review and the likes), some collaboration features etc etc
Yes lost me reading after few minutes because I still didn't know what I was reading about
Slightly unrelated maybe, but I'm really hoping that the https://once.com model would take off. That would be the change I would want to see in the software world. It's more simpler to understand than governance, public interest, etc. Just pay once and own the software. I really don't think software is that deep or has many philosophical implications.
But isn't that out of sync with reality? If I have to maintain software and put in more hours but only get paid once, I have to grow and grow and grow to keep getting paid. I'm actually developing a screen recording app for macos that's gonna be paid once, but will only have updates for a year. You can use it until apple changes APIs and whatever, but otherwise it wouldn't be a sustainable business model for me.
I think before we talk about being only paid once for software (which isn't a finished product like a brick anyway) we need to figure that out.
This was solved before subscriptions took over everything by having to pay for new major versions. You pay once and have a limited duration of updates, after that you stick with the current version or pay again for the upgrade.
The benefit of doing it this way was that the user had a choice in upgrading which aligned incentives between users and developers. The developer had to deliver tangible improvements in order to keep payments from existing users coming. These days they change the color scheme every six months, remove features, change the UI for no dicernable reason and label the whole changelog "Various changes and bug fixes" when the product is clearly a mature product that should be in maintenance mode with no significant changes required.
then there's no money for actual maintenance beyond that say a year.
Which is fine.
And also drives user-centric innovation. If I buy your app and you release a new major version, you have to convince me to buy it again. Which means putting in features I'd need as a user, not just the ones that look good on shareholder meetings.
No I totally hear you, I don't even practice what I preach because I have a subscription-based side-project: https://forms.md
I guess I would like to see someone make the Once model work to great success. I don't know how you would deal with updates and stuff, but that's what I meant. One "simple" solution is just charging the LTV (or something that's close to it) as the one-time price.
I mean, that used to just be how software was sold and it seemed to work then
Hell, you used to pay a dollar for Android games and you just had the game
The "once model" is just classic computing and it is alive and well. Most of the highest quality software work on the pay once model, and generally it's very affordable.
My question for these projects will always be: what do you offer over the Web? I'll grant that most people lack the technical know-how to create their own website from scratch, but it's perfectly possible to buy your own little plot of internet and plug-in to some hosting provider who bundles in a blogging package.
Funny how I read the title as "slow software is burning the world", as in: slow/unoptimized software wastes energy, a good portion of that energy comes from fossil fuels, so it is literally burning the world.
But anyways, it looks like some kind of framework for social networks that is highly politicized and supposedly puts people at the forefront but has no problem using AI slop for its illustrations.
My understanding of how ActivityPub software tends to operate says that while this may be slow, it probably will burn the world a bit more... Just see Ted Unangst's posts about writing Honk (and dealing with the behavior of other implementations)
This project looks cool but seems to be more interested in their governance model/politics than actually building it? Lot's of handwavy references to socialist movements but not a lot of documentation?
Refreshing reading. I hope we soon move to an era where this kind of initiative is the starting point. (In opposition to the make quick money model)
P2P everything, then.
To scale up to a billion+ users of [whatever], it's easier if every user controls their own data (and some of 'nearby' users) on their own devices. Logically you'd need P2P between those billion+ users to make that network as a whole work.
BUT: figuring out how to do that well, is hard. Doing that in centralized manner (centralized database, users are clients only, etc) is easier. And gives maximum control to whoever starts it.
Of course scaling that means big hosting / bandwidth costs, to recoup (and profit!), enter advertising & all the bad incentives that come with it.
Like you, I hope the ad-supported everything crap is just a transitional stage, and by-the-people, for-the-people becomes the norm.
But P2P services done well is hard. The struggles of crypto coins, (truly) decentralized file sharing, and would-be FB competitors are just a few examples.
Yes i have also been thinking about this lately. P2P , you jst send your social updates to a couple of hundred friend and family. If you are one of those «influencers» then is expensive :D
there is a fine balance between new features and performance (e.g. android/ios apis, .net apis in unity game engine etc.)
but I think there's a consensus around certain software not keeping its responsiveness acceleration on par with hardware capability acceleration, some of it driven by ideas like "everyone phone now has 8gb of ram, c'mon", but most of it by profit incentives on the other side, e.g. cloud providers.
I was really happy to discover proxmox (my micro-homelab is a dell mini pc, a mid-range asus gaming router, a 2-slot synology nas, and it's rocking)
then, hetzner (for workloads that cannot be hosted on my homelab), they have an outstanding performance for 3-5$ monthly. before that I used aws lightsail, digital ocean droplets, and before that I used google cloud. I basically started with the worst and ended up with the best, I'm quite sad about that as I've wasted so many hours learning the stupid GCP ui, which was buggy and convoluted af. basically I went on one of the worst paths in terms of devops/sysadmin leverage, wasting time on semi-non-transferrable skills. this was not my main job, though, it was mostly hobby projects but still
In my opinion, it’s good to make these mistakes earlier rather than later on. You got the scars early enough to think there must be a better way, as opposed to starting with the “old school way” and then thinking that AWS/GCP would make it easier.
hm, I think I would've never gone with a cloud provider if I knew about these low-barrier self-hosting solutions.
it definitely helps to have scars, though. just pray something/someone takes you out of the pain soon enough (it took me ~4y to finally realize there has to be a better way at least for small/medium projects)
I fail to see how your comment relates to the article or the Bonfire project. But maybe the general approach triggered you to post this. I am curious. Would you enlighten me?
I dont get it. Faster software should use less resources. So? Why slower software? :D
Software is built by humans, for humans, and we should feel that, see that, when we are using it, and even when we are not using it, i mean the resposibility developers should take writing those lines of code, the moral side of things, the long term consequeces of their blind choices, genius evil algorithms, and yes developers and not managers or those people at "the top", because at the end of the day, the developer is the one giving it all to make that peace of software works, i told myself many times before that we have laready reached an era where software is built by machines for humans, long before A.I and vibe coding .
Treating the symptoms and not the problem.
It caught my attention big time. All up until the point the word "caracul" was linked to the Zapatista movement, literally -- as in, to the Wikipedia page on Zapatista -- which, in turn says:
> is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico.[4][5][6][7]
I don't mean to preach political theory now, but as far as I can see we're already collectively pretty divided (divide and conquer comes to mind): for a project that seems to preach all manner of fairness and correction of a system gone wrong, and is arguably moderately anti-capitalist (in the sense of objecting some of the status-quo product of Silicon Valley's mode of operation), do we really need to be thrown all the way to the other end of the left-right scale? Is Bonfire arguing for the analogue of "militant revolution" of software?
Imagining the project now, I am envisioning green-clad militants writing "fair" software. While not without merit, in my opinion the explicit political associations detract from the intrinsic value something like Bonfire could have for us, who are indeed have never been more firmly under the boot of the commercial IT industry than now.
The way I read these capitalist/anti-capitalist debates is that those for capitalism usually have an idealized version of it in their heads and those against it have some very specific issue in mind.
In Latin America, there are many communities that have suffered because of specific capitalist ventures: a banana plantation, a copper mine, etc.
You have to acknowledge these things and offer a better version of capitalism if you want diminish this divide.
Meanwhile, those who are for socialism usually have an idealised version of it in their heads and those against it have some very specific issue in mind.
People are funny.
You seem to be recoiling from the idea of average people being armed and militant. Like its surprising or outside of normal.
Im going to assume you're a reasonable person and have been watching some news. You probably think like I do that its good for society to follow some laws and have some checks on different groups power.
Hows that working out right now? You know without meaningful militancy on one side of the political spectrum.
Its been my experience when people ask for "politics" to be taken out of a thing they implicitly ask for the politics of the status quo. Which is domination by the commercial software industry and anything else the rich own, because they write the laws.
> Profit over people: at what cost?
Profit hasn't been the goal of Silicon Valley for a very long time. Revenue and growth have been the goals, and chasing those two has been much more damaging than chasing profits.
Aren't they chasing those to ultimately generate profits?
Not in the past 10 years or so, no.
To the point that Uber said they may never generate profit in their IPO filing
> in their IPO filing
That's meaningless -- just legal boilerplate.
No one wants to be sued for their dog & pony show sales pitch, so they always hedge by including explicit doom & gloom scenarios in the legal paperwork.
Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps of all sizes.
> That's meaningless -- just legal boilerplate.
However legal or meaningless, it's their official stated position. And they did lose close to 20 billion in total before turning a meagre profit.
> so they always hedge by including explicit doom & gloom scenarios in the legal paperwork.
Ah yes, "we may never turn a profit that's why we are a sustainable long-term serious company and you should definitely buy our stock" is a thing that every company writes in their legal boilerplate.
> Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps of all sizes.
Uber's annual reports were "we lost a billion dollars this year, like every other year before that for 15 years, but look at our growth go brrr"
Same for most of other HN darlings.
Yes, that's absolutely what they write. They will always be explicit that they could be wrong in disastrous ways and they are not misleading you into thinking otherwise.
Every public corp's "official stated position" on future profitability is, from a legal perspective, the same:
No promises. We might fail because of (long list of endogenous and exogenous reasons). Past performance is no guarantee of future results. We see headwinds here, here, and here. There are headwinds that we cannot see. We can't predict the future. Some hostile actor in some country, foreign or domestic, might screw us all by legal, political, or military means. Also, natural disasters, pandemics, asteroids, and trends. Don't sue us.
There's a difference between "we have never been profitable and don't expect to be" and, say, Google's "we became profitable, and though there are factors that can negatively affect our profitability, here's a path we believe is most profitable".
In modern business profitability never enters the equation.
But my point is that one of those statements will exist in every filing. If the corp has never been profitable, the first. Otherwise, the second.
They mean absolutely nothing about what management expects for the future of the company. They are just legal boilerplate that is always included.
How can they take whatever ridiculous percentage of every ride and still not make a profit ...?
They may never, but the competitors they killed with being VC funded, will never