Should be good now, we redeployed onto a beta release to test out some feature fixes. We’re basically dogfooding this every day!

It’s going to be, group federation only partially works in Bonfire today. The devs are very close to shipping it in an upcoming stable release.

Dansup actually designed and built both of those.

It’s not. Dansup has mentioned in the past actually having to reduce some of the design elements because someone thought the previous design was vibe-coded. He doesn’t do that.

No, that’s accurate. It’s basically that, except it’s done through ActivityPub federation, aggregates a bunch of different types of activity objects, and makes them sortable / searchable / filterable / rendered in a pretty interface. It can even help provide a lot of that info to other instances connected to it.

Like, aside from some foundational bits, the technology itself is not super special. Actually, Bonfire does a ton of really cool things under the hood, but that’s only a little bit relevant.

On the bright side, it does make a bunch of things easier to find, search for, and learn about:

• Groups
• Events
• Articles
• Collections of Actors
• Any type of media

Like, honestly it’s an idea that sounds kind of stupid on the surface, but it’s basically federated Yahoo with a grassroots bent. But I think there are aspects, from a community organizing aspect, that this could actually be useful. It’s like hyperlocalism but for the network itself. You offer ways for people to find communities, read about what’s being developed, find some mom and pop business, commission an artist, listen to some music.

I think what might really set it apart is that no one has built a Fediverse instance specifically geared towards that way of thinking. That’s what we’re interested in trying.