Latest news with #Mastodon
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Bonfire's new software lets users build their own social communities, free from platform control
Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it's powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it's designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more control over how the app functions, which features and defaults are in place, and what their own roadmap and priorities will include. There's a decidedly disruptive bent to the software, which describes itself as a place where "all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control." In other words, its mission is to build social software where people get to make the decisions, not Big Tech platform makers like Meta or Google. The organization itself runs as a nonprofit funded by donations and grants, and it doesn't take venture capital. Its code is open source, and it works in collaboration with the communities and researchers that use it to build and enhance online digital spaces. Bonfire Social, now offered as a 1.0 Release Candidate ahead of the public release, is just one representation of what Bonfire offers. Bonfire calls it a "flavor." Each flavor is a preconfigured bundle of Bonfire extensions, features, and defaults, sort of like a starting template. When a community opts to run a particular "flavor," it gets to govern the app as it sees fit, adding its own extensions and determining its own roadmap for product changes. This puts the social software back under users' control, instead of being subject to the whims of a platform maker with ever-changing feature sets and algorithms. The organization is already developing other flavors, like Bonfire Community and Open Science, and the Bonfire software lets any other community create their own version. In Bonfire Social, users will recognize familiar features, like feeds and tools to follow users, share posts, create user profiles, flag or block content, and more. However, it also offers other tools and features that traditional social networks may not have, like tools for customizing feeds, support for nested discussions, the ability to host multiple profiles per user, rich-text posts, and access control features. Custom feeds are a key differentiation between Bonfire and traditional social media apps. Though the idea of following custom feeds is something that's been popularized by newer social networks like Bluesky or social browsers like Flipboard's Surf, the tools to actually create those feeds are maintained by third parties. Bonfire instead offers its own custom feed-building tools in a simple interface that doesn't require users to understand coding. To build feeds, users can filter and sort content by type, date, engagement level, source instance, and more, including something it calls "circles." Those who lived through the Google+ era of social networks may be familiar with the concept of Circles. On Google's social network, users organized contacts into groups, called Circles, for optimized sharing. That concept lives on at Bonfire, where a circle represents a list of people. That can be a group of friends, a fan group, local users, organizers at a mutual aid group, or anything else users can come up with. These circles are private by default but can be shared with others. Another unique feature on Bonfire Social is Boundaries, which let you control who can see or engage with your content. For instance, you could share a post with a number of your circles, but only allow one specific circle's members to comment. Bonfire also supports threaded conversations (nested discussions) where replies can branch out into their own sub-threads. This can be useful for communities where deeper discussions and collaboration are more valuable than those where everyone competes for attention. Plus, Bonfire users can customize the app using one of the 16 built-in themes, or they can design their own layout and pick their own colors and fonts. Accounts on Bonfire can also host multiple profiles that have their own followers, content, and settings. This could be useful for those who simply prefer to have both public and private profiles, but also for those who need to share a given profile with others -- like a profile for a business, a publication, a collective, or a project team. Other features available at launch include PWA support for mobile devices, community blocklists, custom emoji support, full-text search (with opt out), direct messages, private group discussions (also with nested threads), and more. Extensions, which add different features, can be enabled or disabled by both admins and users. Admins simply decide what the defaults are. That means users could turn on or off features they don't like, even core features such as likes or boosts (the federated version of the retweet/repost). Because Bonfire is built on ActivityPub, it also federates with Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, and others. The software is meant to be self-installed, though work to develop a hosting network is under way. For those who just want to kick the tires, a demo instance is available. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Verge
a day ago
- Business
- The Verge
Here are three new apps building out the open social web
For the past couple of years, the virtual FediForum conference has offered a glimpse at what's new in the open social web, with last year's big news being Threads' foray into the fediverse. This year's presentation was no different, with several developers showing off new apps that will help to expand the ecosystem of decentralized social networks. Bonfire Social, one of the new apps, is meant to serve as a framework for creating digital communities, each with their own governance and style. During FediForum, Bonfire announced that they're releasing Bonfire Social 1.0 as the first 'flavor' of the platform. Bonfire Social comes with a 'a pre-configured bundle of Bonfire extensions that defines which features are included,' like custom feeds, profiles, and threaded discussions, along with the ability to share posts and follow other users. The makers of Bonfire are working on other 'flavors' of the platform, including Bonfire Community, which is geared toward private groups and organizations, as well as Open Science, a platform designed for collaboration between academic communities. Bonfire Social federates with Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, and others. You can install Bonfire Social now or check out the demo. Another new service announced at FediForum is which is designed to help you curate the content you see across the open social web. Users can tailor their feed by tracking specific hashtags and users, including bridged Bluesky accounts and RSS parrots. Other users can follow the channels you create, which are distributed across the Fediverse, Bluesky, and over RSS. You can filter out certain keywords and mute accounts not related to the topics you want to follow, and there are also built-in filters that block NSFW content and hate speech. is built on a customized Mastodon server run by the Newsmast Foundation, a fediverse-focused charity based in the UK, and it sounds like a neat way to create an ultra-curated social feed. The service is currently available in an invite-only beta, but you can sign up for the waitlist to receive updates. You can check out some examples of channels from website. One of the other notable services highlighted today was Bounce, an app that allows you to move your Bluesky account to Mastodon, all without losing any of your followers. The app is built by A New Social, the creators of the Bridgy Fed tool that Bounce uses to connect your Bluesky account to Mastodon. Once your account is bridged, Bounce can then transfer personal data servers using the 'move' capability offered by ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, letting you retain your Bluesky followers — and the people you follow — when heading to Mastodon.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Bonfire's new software lets users build their own social communities, free from platform control
Bonfire Social, a new framework for building communities on the open social web, launched on Thursday during the FediForum online conference. While Bonfire Social is a federated app, meaning it's powered by the same underlying protocol as Mastodon (ActivityPub), it's designed to be more modular and more customizable. That means communities on Bonfire have more control over how the app functions, which features and defaults are in place, and what their own roadmap and priorities will include. There's a decidedly disruptive bent to the software, which describes itself as a place where "all living beings thrive and communities flourish, free from private interest and capitalistic control." In other words, its mission is to build social software where people get to make the decisions, not big tech platform makers like Meta or Google. The organization itself runs as a nonprofit funded by donations and grants, and it doesn't take venture capital. Its code is open source, and it works in collaboration with the communities and researchers that use it to build and enhance online digital spaces. Bonfire Social, now offered as a 1.0 Release Candidate ahead of the public release, is just one representation of what Bonfire offers. Bonfire calls it a "flavor." Each flavor is a preconfigured bundle of Bonfire extensions, features, and defaults, sort of like a starting template. When a community opts to run a particular "flavor," it gets to govern the app as it sees fit, adding its own extensions and determining its own roadmap for product changes. This puts the social software back under users' control, instead of being subject to the whims of a platform maker with an ever-changing feature sets and algorithms. The organization is already developing other flavors like Bonfire Community and Open Science, and the Bonfire software lets any other community create their own version. In Bonfire Social, users will recognize familiar features, like feeds and tools to follow users, share posts, create user profiles, flag or block content, and more. However, it also offers other tools and features that traditional social networks may not have, like tools for customizing feeds, support for nested discussions, the ability to host multiple profiles per user, rich-text posts, and access control features. Custom feeds are a key differentiation between Bonfire and traditional social media apps. Though the idea of following custom feeds is something that's been popularized by newer social networks like Bluesky or social browsers like Flipboard's Surf, the tools to actually create those feeds are maintained by third parties. Bonfire instead offers its own custom feed-building tools in a simple interface that doesn't require users to understand coding. To build feeds, users can filter and sort content by type, date, engagement level, source instance, and more, including something it calls "circles." Those who lived through the Google+ era of social networks may be familiar with the concept of Circles. On Google's social network, users organized contacts into groups, called Circles, for optimized sharing. That concept lives on at Bonfire, where a circle represents a list of people. That can be a group of friends, a fan group, local users, organizers at a mutual aid group, or anything else users can come up with. These circles are private by default but can be shared with others. Another unique feature on Bonfire Social is Boundaries, which let you control who can see or engage with your content. For instance, you could share a post with a number of your circles, but only allow one specific circle's members to comment. Bonfire also supports threaded conversations (nested discussions) where replies can branch out into their own sub-threads. This can be useful for communities where deeper discussions and collaboration are more valuable than those where everyone competes for attention. Plus, Bonfire users can customize the app using one of the 16 built-in themes, or they can design their own layout and pick their own colors and fonts. Accounts on Bonfires can also host multiple profiles that have their own followers, content, and settings. This could be useful for those who simply prefer to have both public and private profiles, but also for those who need to share a given profile with others -- like a profile for a business, a publication, a collective, or a project team. Other features available at launch include PWA support for mobile devices, community blocklists, custom emoji support, full-text search (with opt out), direct messages, private group discussions (also with nested threads), and more. Extensions, which add different features, can be enabled or disabled by both admins and users. Admins simply decide what the defaults are. That means users could turn on or off features they don't like, even core features such as likes or boosts (the federated version of the retweet/repost). Because Bonfire is built on ActivityPub, it also federates with Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, and others. The software is meant to be self-installed, though work to develop a hosting network is under way. For those who just want to kick the tires, a demo instance is available.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Introducing Bounce, a tool to move your following between Bluesky and Mastodon
A major development showcasing the potential for the open social web was unveiled Thursday at the online conference known as FediForum. The makers of Bridgy Fed, the tool that connects decentralized open social networks, like Mastodon and Bluesky, developed a new project called Bounce that will allow users to migrate their social network followers across networks powered by different protocols. This is a significant step toward making the open social web a more viable alternative to the locked-in ecosystems provided by tech giants like Meta, Snap, Google, TikTok, and X — and where you may be able to delete your account and export your data when you leave, but not actually migrate your account to a new app. Today, Mastodon, Bluesky, and other social services that run on their protocols (ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, respectively) allow users to move their accounts within their protocol network. That means a Mastodon user can migrate their account to another Mastodon server, while Bluesky allows users to move their accounts and data from one Personal Data Server (PDS) to another. (The latter is still a work in progress because you can move off of Bluesky's PDS but not back to it!) However, it hasn't been possible for users to move their accounts or retain their followings by moving from one network to another. Now led by a nonprofit called A New Social, the makers of Bridgy Fed have developed technology that will make this type of migration possible. The tech builds on Bridgy Fed to allow users to "move" their Bluesky account to their Mastodon profile's bridged account (an account that listens for your Mastodon posts and then replicates them on Bluesky so your Bluesky followers can see them), then take the bridged account and "move" it to the user's Mastodon profile. How all this works under the hood is technically complicated because both platforms have different ways of handling migrations. That's why Bridgy Fed has to function as something of a middleman, enabling the transition with servers of its own, custom-built for the purpose of bridging and moves. Currently a proof-of-concept, the technology will launch into beta in a few weeks -- but not for the casual user. "I don't want to go as far as saying it's a tech demo, but it was really important to prove that this is possible," says New Social's CEO and executive director, Anuj Ahooja. There are some complications at present, too. You can't move back to Bluesky's PDS because the social network hasn't built out that technology yet, for starters. Also, if someone on Bluesky who isn't bridged interacts with your "moved" account, you won't see that once you're on the Mastodon side. But the team is working on developing a feature that will notify you of off-bridge interactions, Ahooja says. In addition, Bounce alerts you to how many of the people you follow aren't bridged, so if they ever do bridge, you can re-follow them. Ultimately, the team hopes the technology in Bounce would be obscured from the everyday open social user, who could instead decide simply what app they want to use and then go through a few short steps to move their following. And while today, Bounce supports Bluesky, Mastodon, and Pixelfed (an ActivityPub-based photo-sharing app), the longer-term goal would be to support any open social platform and protocol, whether that's a long-form blogging platform like Ghost, or even other networks like those running on Nostr or Farcaster. "We're trying to create an interface for the open social web to handle some of these tougher movements that you have to make," explained Ahooja. "So, if you're unhappy with something Bluesky is doing -- or even if you're not unhappy, but you feel like a platform on the ActivityPub side is doing something that you really needed to do...[you could] do these couple of clicks on Bounce," he added. Bounce is the third project from A New Social. In addition to Bridgy Fed, the organization also launched a settings page a few weeks ago that makes the process of preparing to bridge easier and allows you to set a custom domain for your account. The overall goal at A New Social is to shift the power of social networks back to the people, not the platform makers, by giving them tools that let them move their account and their followings, and leave if a platform ever fails them in some way. This motto of 'People not Platforms' is now emblazoned on merch A New Social sells, like tees, hoodies, hats, cups, and stickers that help monetize its efforts, alongside its Patreon.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Introducing Bounce, a tool to move your following between Bluesky and Mastodon
A major development showcasing the potential for the open social web was unveiled Thursday at the online conference known as FediForum. The makers of Bridgy Fed, the tool that connects decentralized open social networks, like Mastodon and Bluesky, developed a new project called Bounce that will allow users to migrate their social network followers across networks powered by different protocols. This is a significant step towards making the open social web a more viable alternative to the locked-in ecosystems provided by tech giants like Meta, Snap, Google, TikTok, and X — and where you may be able to delete your account and export your data when you leave, but not actually migrate your account to a new app. Today, Mastodon, Bluesky, and other social services that run on their protocols (ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, respectively) allow users to move their accounts within their protocol network. That means a Mastodon user can migrate their account to another Mastodon server, while Bluesky allows users to move their accounts and data from one Personal Data Server (PDS) to another. (The latter is still a work in progress because you can move off of Bluesky's PDS but not back to it!) However, it hasn't been possible for users to move their accounts or retain their followings by moving from one network to another. Now led by a nonprofit called A New Social, the makers of Bridgy Fed have developed technology that will make this type of migration possible. The tech builds on Bridgy Fed to allow users to "move" their Bluesky account to their Mastodon profile's bridged account (an account that listens for your Mastodon posts and then replicates them on Bluesky so your Bluesky followers can see them), then take the bridged account and "move" it to the user's Mastodon profile. How all this works under the hood is technically complicated because both platforms have different ways of handling migrations. That's why Bridgy Fed has to function as something of a middleman, enabling the transition with servers of its own, custom-built for the purpose of bridging and moves. Currently a proof-of-concept, the technology will launch into beta in a few weeks -- but not for the casual user. "I don't want to go as far as saying it's a tech demo, but it was really important to prove that this is possible," says New Social's CEO and executive director, Anuj Ahooja. There are some complications at present, too. You can't move back to Bluesky's PDS because the social network hasn't built out that technology yet, for starters. Also, if someone on Bluesky who isn't bridged interacts with your "moved" account, you won't see that once you're on the Mastodon side. But the team is working on developing a feature that will notify you of off-bridge interactions, Ahooja says. In addition, Bounce alerts you to how many of the people you follow aren't bridged, so if they ever do bridge, you can re-follow them. Ultimately, the team hopes the technology in Bounce would be obscured from the everyday open social user, who could instead decide simply what app they want to use and then go through a few short steps to move their following. And while today, Bounce supports Bluesky, Mastodon, and Pixelfed (an ActivityPub-based photo-sharing app), the longer-term goal would be to support any open social platform and protocol, whether that's a long-form blogging platform like Ghost, or even other networks like those running on Nostr or Farecaster. "We're trying to create an interface for the open social web to handle some of these tougher movements that you have to make," explained Ahooja. "So, if you're unhappy with something Bluesky is doing -- or even if you're not unhappy, but you feel like a platform on the ActivityPub side is doing something that you really needed to do...[you could] do these couple of clicks on Bounce," he added. Bounce is the third project from A New Social. In addition to Bridgy Fed, the organization also launched a settings page a few weeks ago that makes the process of preparing to bridge easier and allows you to set a custom domain for your account. The overall goal at A New Social is to shift the power of social networks back to the people, not the platform makers, by giving them tools that let them move their account, their followings, and leave if a platform ever fails them in some way. This motto of 'People not Platforms' is now emblazoned on merch A New Social sells, like tees, hoodies, hats, cups, and stickers that help monetize its efforts, alongside its Patreon. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at
