Oh, does every action just show up in the public feed? Is there a way to just show posts and not what people are liking and following?

And a test reply

Just writing a test post

yeah! would you be up for it?

I’d welcome feedback on my own, or on my behaviour here in general. My goal is to help, not to bother or discourage contributors.

Another piece of feedback: I feel like broken thumbnails on Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon are part of the global semantics meant to deprecate cognitive resources. It isn’t useful in itself; I guess the image is entirely downloaded anyway, but it forces the user to click on it, which gives them a sort of alert fatigue related to anything richer than about 120 words.

Please either show images as clickable attachments (XMPP style, you don’t download it unless you ask your software to do it) or show them entirely in the feed (honk style). Maybe set the latter as default and let the user define the former as an option.

@BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

Feature request: a Bonfire extension to gamify reading books (or scientific articles).

A caveat IMHO would be to compare how many books one reads with their peers (or how good these books are, which I’m afraid would show through how many followers I have if I made a Bookwyrm account). On the other hand, the knowledge I’ll get by reading one is sometimes too speculative as a motivation.

It isn’t as if Bonfire worsened attention deficit… but it could give its users the additional energy/motivation boost that they’d need to do it.

@BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

Ok I’m gonna sum up my opinion of Bonfire.

It’s good. I’ve been victim of many kinds of surveillance capitalism so I tend to be critical of social media as a concept, but Bonfire seems to be manageable.

A key concept for capitalistic social media is scarcity. Whatever they’re offering, they’re making it deliberately scarce (e.g. attention) to increase its value and trick isolated people into chasing it (e.g. clout). ActivityPub was one step in a more social direction (with native videos, blog posts, events reading, regardless of fundamental flaws in Mastodon as a publishing tool that Gargron probably won’t fix; he doesn’t seem to care) and Bonfire also goes in this direction, to express it poorly it especially shows as a publishing platform, and the brain stimulation reward that I’ve always criticized about notifications is really more manageable.

The last time I’ve used it on a computer (i.e. the last time I’ve posted, because the feature is broken on mobile) I’ve stayed for 2 hours on my computer (especially because installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi made me anxious). Going out in the evening, I’ve felt silly for being so suggestible and asked myself if, like 5 years ago, I had no identity, no singularity. I wonder how asocial people (e.g. isolated highschool students) will appropriate Bonfire and if they’ll get "hooked" anyway. If they can’t diversify their activities by meeting other people, maybe Bonfire could be used to gamify reading books (similarly to Bookwyrm, but without its drawbacks, i.e. having to manage a new account).

🇪🇺 Faisons une analyse géopolitique européenne concise … 🇪🇺

#humour #ukraine #russie #gaz #eau

I've asked around and we have 4-5 friends atm - looking to increase diversity tough

Also, forgot to mention: I'm on an iMac running macOS 12.6 and accessing bonfire through Google Chrome!

Amazing work, you guys! I stumbled on bonfire because I was trying to figure out how I might be able to create a closed, private social network. Been following the development for several months now—so excited to see how far it's come, and can't wait to see it grow in the future!

Just some general notes from my exploration of the Playground today. Hope some of them may be useful:

*General UI/UX issues:

1. I clicked on someone's post, then when I tried to open the sidebar, it expanded under the background of the theme. Trying to upload a screenshot to this post, but when I try to attach something I get no indication of whether my upload succeeded or failed, so I have no idea whether it's working or not.
2. Tried to make a circle for just myself, and had a hard time figuring out how to do that. Wasn't sure what the difference between boundaries and circles is, and was a little confused when I could make a boundary while posting, but not a circle. When I made a boundary from the posting window, I wasn't able to add individual users. I made a circle from the Boundaries and Circles tab, and was able to add myself to the same circle twice, once by username and once from the "Suggested Users" tab, and then could not delete either one from the circle (error: "Could not remove from circle"). Further, when I added myself by username, an "undefined" field remained in the box where I input my username.
3. General confusion as to how things work. I'm not a super technical user and have limited experience with the Fediverse in general, so maybe this is my problem, but I feel like the average person would have the same issues that I did. The icons on the left hand side for the different extensions didn't really make sense (e.g. why is a Japanese arch the icon for "Topics"?) and I had to expand the menu to navigate more easily. All the options to control groups in my Boundaries are a little overwhelming, especially since I have to mouse over each one to see what it does.
4. I wasn't sure if Topics functioned like a forum topic, or if they were more like a hashtag that grouped related posts. Still not totally sure, to be honest. It felt strange that the list of topics and recent posts were split into two even columns—I wasn't sure which was supposed to be the main content of the page, and what I should be looking at. I also wish each Topic told me things like number of comments/sub-topics and when the last post in it was, so that I could see which Topics are active without having to open each one. Also odd that on the front page, Trending Topics lists topics that start with hashtags and ones that do not (e.g. "#humour" alongside "bonfire") which adds to my confusion of how they work and what they are. I wanted to reply to one topic, but when I hit "Reply" it said I was creating a "sub-topic" (with fields for "category" name and description) and prompted me for a title, so I wasn't sure if I was creating a comment thread/chain, or if it would create a separate sub-topic within the main topic, or how things work at in general.
5. Topics in general feel really weird to me. The reverse-chronological order is really off-putting, as is the lack of clarity of how replies go together. I tried replying to someone and it seemed to create an entirely different topic. It looks like these subtopics have threaded replies within them. None of this makes much sense to me at all. I did see some of the team's discussions on Matrix or something about trying to come up with a better way of having discussions, which I think is a great and admirable goal, but this current implementation is far less clear to me than any forum or comment page I've ever visited before. When I replied to someone's topic, I just ended up creating a series of sub-topics, which I then had no way of deleting.
6. Tried to reply to a topic, got the error "A condition didn't receive data that matched a format it could recognise." Refreshed and tried again, and it worked.
7. I chose the "Floating" option for composing posts, and I noticed immediately that the contents of my draft is not saved when navigating from page to page or even tab to tab within the same page. This feels like it should definitely be implemented, since even now I have to constantly copy the contents of my textbox as I navigate around the Playground to make sure I don't lose my writing.
8. I have an "Untitled task" that I can't open or delete. Opening it brings me to a page reading "An error occurred" while deleting it allows me to hit "Delete this intent" but then the page reloads and it's still there. It's also always at the top of my Feed and can't be removed from there either. It wasn't there at first, I think it appeared after I played with the tasks feature.
9. Opening the "Remote" tab under the Feeds page results in a page that just reloads endlessly and seems very glitchy, though the bonfire animation is very cool indeed 🙂
10. Minor UI issue: the "Follow" button on a topic page is right up against the bottom of the top box containing the topic title and description. Also a minor design inconsistency where most of the buttons I see are rounded rectangles, but the "Follow" button inside of a topic itself has fully rounded/semicircular ends.
11. I found the "Read Discussion" popup bar annoying on the Feed page. Every time I mouse over a post it pops up, and I wish it was just there to begin with, or that more of the discussion was instantly visible without having to navigate to the individual discussion page.
12. Things feel split up in a non-intuitive way that I'm still struggling to figure out. It looks like Topics are more of a forum-type discussion where people can post about a specific subject, and the main feed is where you're meant to post about anything you want (like a Twitter or Facebook profile). However, I'm not sure how they connect, or if they do, or which one is the "main" one. Maybe that's up to the admin of the individual instance. But at this point I remain somewhat confused. Little things like my Feed and the homepage having a box for "Trending topics" when the Topics page doesn't are minor details that lead to me feeling a little lost.
13. I also find it a little weird how sometimes I'm making a "Post" and sometimes it's a "Sub-topic" — I get that it just depends on whether or nor I'm in the Topics page, but I wish there was a clearer visual differentiation. For instance, a floating textbox whenever I make a post, and a nested textbox within topics (and maybe it floats when scrolling through a topic, but maintains the width/position of the topic column so that it feels more integrated).

I realize those are very rambling and disorganized notes, but I figured it might be helpful to get reactions from a "regular" user, so I tried to be thorough! I also know that this is a beta and work-in-progress, and that a lot of the hiccups are due to things changing and some features not being quite finished. Overall, SUPER impressed with your work and how far it's come in such a short time. Can't wait to see where it goes next!

@BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

wow a lot has happened since last I logged into #bonfire!

gravitar is a bit different in that different pictures can be assigned to different personas, but something like that would indeed be very cool

Primo toot di prova !👍