Bonfire Networks

Bonfire Networks is a non-profit collective building Bonfire, an open-source, modular framework for federated social networking. Rather than offering a single product, Bonfire provides composable building blocks that communities can assemble into “flavours” — preconfigured bundles of extensions tailored to specific needs, from social networking to open science collaboration.

Bonfire was designed from the ground up as a general-purpose framework for community-governed digital spaces. Development is led by a small distributed team practicing consent-based decision-making, with features co-designed alongside partner organisations.

Bonfire launched version 1.0 at the end of 2025, accompanied by a crowdfunding campaign to let communities drive what gets built next. Bonfire Social is the first flavour to ship, while other flavours — including Open Science Network, an ORCID-certified research community platform — are already in development.

Governance & Funding

Funding model: Bonfire runs as a not-for-profit project funded by donations and grants, and we don’t take venture capital. Bonfire has primarily been funded through NGI0, provided by NLnet Foundation with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme. We’ve received multiple grants over the years covering different scopes: search & discovery, federated groups, and framework stabilisation. Alongside that, we accept donations via Open Collective and have run a crowdfunding campaign paired with the 1.0 release so that communities drive what we build next.

Governance: We’re focused on community sovereignty: empowering people to shape their own digital spaces rather than being subject to corporate platforms’ algorithms and enshittification. We draw on consent-based decision-making practices such as sociocracy, with circles as a way to organise autonomous but interdependent teams, projects, organisations, and codebases.

Co-design approach: Features are co-designed with communities and stakeholders. Each feature is being co-designed with organisations bringing domain expertise, from Princeton HCI’s research on collective governance to Co-op Cloud’s work on community hosting infrastructure. We’ve also partnered with UXDI, a user experience and inclusive design course in South America, mentoring design students who use Bonfire as a case study. We use sandbox instances for community testing and co-design, and maintain a public roadmap.

Let’s build together

We invite your community to partner with the Bonfire Team to co-design a dedicated flavour for your community, which can seamlessly integrate your website, social network, and custom tools into a cohesive federated digital space. Book a call to discuss further.