Chris Wood
activity timestamp 3 years ago

Hey @ivan


I've been thinking a lot about how we could make federated social networks more accessible for people who:

  • Don't want to learn how to set up hosting or use the terminal.
  • Have a limited knowledge of instances, federation, and all the technical workings of the Fediverse.
  • Want an online space for their community which isn't Facebook.


I know you mentioned it's something your team's been considering a lot as well.


I wanted to wireframe a Bonfire setup process which doesn't require any technical knowledge. No finding a hosting provider, and no using a terminal. I also wanted to experiment with concepts which users would be familiar with from other digital products, like "trial" and "upgrade," by offering hosting as a service which can be bought and managed within Bonfire.


My idea is that users can set up a test instance on a Bonfire-hosted server as a "free trial," with a limit on the resources which this instance can use. Once they have tried out Bonfire's features and customised their instance to suit their needs, they can then pay for a hosting plan with a partner company. Their instance's data is then transferred from the Bonfire-hosted server to the partner company's server, and any appropriate DNS records are set up automatically (either for the subdomain.bonfire.cafe address, or for their own custom domain).


Here's my prototype:

design.penpot.app/#/view/27a...


What do you think of the idea?
ivan
activity timestamp 3 years ago
@Azuredusk10 wow this is so great, thanks for putting so much thoughts on it 馃槏 馃槏

This is quite a sincronicity indeed, because we are having this discussion again with @mayel since the past week.

It makes me wonder 2 things:

  • Your initiative is an opportunity to try to develop such crucial feature (both in terms of user adoption and in term of economic sustainability) in the open and together with the community
  • We can move the actual bonfire mockups design system from figma to penpot, and try to make it more accessible for other designers to use / improve it
Dazinism
activity timestamp 3 years ago
@Azuredusk10 @bonfire @fediverse @ivan

Having worked on a lot of projects with low/no budget, particularly at their beginning, I wonder if a good 'solidarity' support structure could be designed?

Im thinking free to get going, with some explanation of resources required to keep it going and requests for contributions.


Maybe some easy way for the hoster to have good visibility into resource usage and to trigger requests - that could optionally go out to the instance 'admin' and/or their users (give the admin some choices)

Also have some clearly defined streams for regular contributions where you may then avoid requests
Chris Wood
activity timestamp 3 years ago
@ivan Thank you for taking a look!


I imagine that lots of Fediverse projects require some technical knowledge to set up. Even something relatively straightforward like "Go to Mastohost's website and pay for a hosting plan" might seem easy to someone with experience, but overwhelming for someone who doesn't know what they're doing.


It would be brilliant to work on removing that technical skills barrier in the open and create a new source of revenue for the projects. That's a great idea 馃檶 if there's anything more I can help with, I'd love to be involved.


There might be concerns around having only 1 private company hosting the majority of instances for a platform, e.g. what happens if the platform gets very popular and an investor buys the biggest hosting company of that platform? It would be worth thinking about how we tackle that as well.


In terms of moving the design system to Penpot, I should let you know that you can share a prototype publicy like I did, but you can't share the actual design file publicy. You can only invite others to join via email - there's no option to share a view-only link or anything like that, which you have in Figma. So I think it would be harder for other designers to access Bonfire's design work if you move it into Penpot at this time.