Slow Software for a Burning World

I cannot figure out what Bonfire is.

- The homepage has a bunch of "Bonfire is...", but they don't tell me much about how Bonfire achieves any of those goals like to be a "commons".

- There's a codebase and documentation, but it comes in six different "flavours", although I can only really differentiate between two.

- Most of the FAQs just say "wip".

- It proudly states that there are no ads, no tracking, etc, but doesn't tell me what there are no ads on, or what isn't tracking me.

- It proudly states that it's federated, but as far as what it federates with, that's "wip".

I'm all for more federation, more data control, and experiments in social networking, but I'm a technical user and I have no idea what this is or does. It feels like in service of wanting to be as abstract and flexible, it maybe just doesn't solve any actual concrete problems.

If it's a toolkit with which to build social networks, that's great, but much of the documentation suggests that it's also a network itself, suggesting perhaps limited use as a toolkit. If it supports ActivityPub or AtProto, it really needs to come out and say that up front. "Bonfire is a framework for building custom AtProto based social networking applications" would be a great summary, or "Bonfire is a Mastodon alternative exploring the frontier of ActivityPub federated applications" would be great too.

I did not understand what this is about from the article. It is social and wants to empower people, but how?

From reading the 'about' page I understood that this is a new social media platform in the Fediverse.

Now there is obviously one question: why should I participate in this and not in the existing projects like Mastodon? Why did you split up?

I suggest the Bonfire people should put the answer to that question on the top of the 'about' page.

I see we still haven't learned to put a summary of what your product is/does near the start of any big announcement.

Slightly unrelated maybe, but I'm really hoping that the https://once.com model would take off. That would be the change I would want to see in the software world. It's more simpler to understand than governance, public interest, etc. Just pay once and own the software. I really don't think software is that deep or has many philosophical implications.

These sites are easy to figure out.

Go to Main Page

Scroll down to go to the "Code of Conduct"

Search on "Reverse"

Read

"Our community prioritises marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. Moderators reserve the right not to act on complaints regarding:

‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia.’ or critiques of racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behaviors or assumptions."

Ask yourself if you want to be a part of a community of people that condones certain racism and sexism.

Refreshing reading. I hope we soon move to an era where this kind of initiative is the starting point. (In opposition to the make quick money model)

Software is built by humans, for humans, and we should feel that, see that, when we are using it, and even when we are not using it, i mean the resposibility developers should take writing those lines of code, the moral side of things, the long term consequeces of their blind choices, genius evil algorithms, and yes developers and not managers or those people at "the top", because at the end of the day, the developer is the one giving it all to make that peace of software works, i told myself many times before that we have laready reached an era where software is built by machines for humans, long before A.I and vibe coding .

there is a fine balance between new features and performance (e.g. android/ios apis, .net apis in unity game engine etc.)

but I think there's a consensus around certain software not keeping its responsiveness acceleration on par with hardware capability acceleration, some of it driven by ideas like "everyone phone now has 8gb of ram, c'mon", but most of it by profit incentives on the other side, e.g. cloud providers.

I was really happy to discover proxmox (my micro-homelab is a dell mini pc, a mid-range asus gaming router, a 2-slot synology nas, and it's rocking)

then, hetzner (for workloads that cannot be hosted on my homelab), they have an outstanding performance for 3-5$ monthly. before that I used aws lightsail, digital ocean droplets, and before that I used google cloud. I basically started with the worst and ended up with the best, I'm quite sad about that as I've wasted so many hours learning the stupid GCP ui, which was buggy and convoluted af. basically I went on one of the worst paths in terms of devops/sysadmin leverage, wasting time on semi-non-transferrable skills. this was not my main job, though, it was mostly hobby projects but still

This project looks cool but seems to be more interested in their governance model/politics than actually building it? Lot's of handwavy references to socialist movements but not a lot of documentation?

It caught my attention big time. All up until the point the word "caracul" was linked to the Zapatista movement, literally -- as in, to the Wikipedia page on Zapatista -- which, in turn says:

> is a far-left political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico.[4][5][6][7]

I don't mean to preach political theory now, but as far as I can see we're already collectively pretty divided (divide and conquer comes to mind): for a project that seems to preach all manner of fairness and correction of a system gone wrong, and is arguably moderately anti-capitalist (in the sense of objecting some of the status-quo product of Silicon Valley's mode of operation), do we really need to be thrown all the way to the other end of the left-right scale? Is Bonfire arguing for the analogue of "militant revolution" of software?

Imagining the project now, I am envisioning green-clad militants writing "fair" software. While not without merit, in my opinion the explicit political associations detract from the intrinsic value something like Bonfire could have for us, who are indeed have never been more firmly under the boot of the commercial IT industry than now.

I dont get it. Faster software should use less resources. So? Why slower software? :D

> Profit over people: at what cost?

Profit hasn't been the goal of Silicon Valley for a very long time. Revenue and growth have been the goals, and chasing those two has been much more damaging than chasing profits.