Good news everyone! The maintenance goal of our crowdfunding campaign is 100% funded. Huge thanks to everyone who supported us! Our focus now moves to the first stretch goal: €25k to co‑design federated groups together with communities.
Whether you are an old‑school tweeter or have moved to the fediverse, you know the status quo: follow people, read your home feed, boost, reply, and maybe gather followers, post thoughts or links and receive random replies. That can be great for conversation and discovery, but the moment you try to organise something together, like an event, project, reading circle or local initiative, you feel the limits of a feed built around individuals.
Shouting at the mythical "global town square" may be fine for chatter but it’s lousy for organising. When you need specific people to see, act, and follow through, you need a group. So your community's calls to action aren't at the mercy of algorithms or noisy feeds.
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 (see FAQ), so communities can grow and thrive without lock‑in.
How this compares with groups on existing platforms **#
Millions of people rely on Facebook groups and other Big Tech platforms to connect and communicate, but enshitification and overnight, top‑down changes keep communities locked in and powerless.
Bonfire’s federated groups restore agency: a shared home to gather and organise without the traps. Communities own their spaces, set visibility and membership on their terms, and members can join and participate from anywhere, without platform or server lock‑in.
> See the FAQ) for details about portability, interop, or how groups compare to forums and “threadiverse” apps.
