I'm particularly interested the first time meeting the folks from BOMFI here myself.
I've been following the project from a distance but I'm really happy to meet them both
and looking forward to hearing how things are going so I will pass across the mic
and let's hear about MOMFI.
Did I put?
Yeah, it works.
Thank you.
So we are quite happy that Mastodam take the lead this morning not having a technical talk.
Our talk will not be a technical leader and we think it's actually a good sign.
And actually also the title is not the real one because this talk is called a contaminated infrastructure.
And this is talk about embracing contamination.
It suggests with example how we can allow ideas, code and communities to reshape each other
for a mutual benefit about how we approach and navigate complexity in BOMFI.
About an alternative path to the big tech dominant vision and about how the Fedivers and the social web
can enable building things that are greater than the sum of their part.
And also about why it is important right now.
To talk about contamination may be easier to start from the opposite and the opposite of contamination
is purity.
And the Silicon Valley builds for purity.
They scale by eliminating variants.
They change acquisition over partnership.
They create wallet guard and over ecosystem.
And they use everything they create are monetized.
And therefore big tech produces monocultures.
And monocultures are fragile.
And when a platform identifies users have nowhere to go with their relationship intact.
When a company strategy shift and their communities discovered their infrastructure was only rented.
And their landlord can change the rules and kick them out anytime.
We see this in agriculture.
Monocultures produce enormous yields.
We can use it in the field of pesticides that the single crops can resist.
Then everything collapses at once.
We are watching the same things happening in tech.
Platform after platform.
The same pattern.
But communities need a viable alternative.
The democracy needs social infrastructure.
The tarpabli common good.
Yeah.
And so we are trying to take a different path.
It's an infrastructure that can involve through the people that we meet and get involved.
We try and build components that interact and combine in ways that even we can't predict.
Organizations that we shape each other's road maps.
Resilience through entanglement rather than control.
We think that plurality is actually a strength rather than a problem to be hidden and complexity as well.
And yes, this means that people are constantly asking.
But what is bonfire?
I don't get it.
And sorry if you still don't get it after this talk.
At first glance, bonfire might look like another microblog in platform.
But we try to go beyond that.
You can share long-form articles, events, book reviews and much more.
And unlike traditional social networks,
where connections are just like friends or followers,
bonfire goes beyond that binary.
You can create circles for like your family, a book club,
a fostering peers, or any group you want.
And when you post, you can choose what circles can see interact or even comment or edit.
Each circle also comes with its own feed.
And you can then share a circle itself publicly.
And that becomes like a starter pack in bush guy.
Or just with selective circles.
Bonfire puts communities in control of their experience.
And how do we do that?
It's by being modular and extensible.
Every feature in bonfire, every bonfire app,
is assembled from extensions.
Extensions aren't just add-ons, plugins that you can add a little feature.
They're the substance.
Everything in bonfire is built as an extension.
And that means that you can swap them out and replace them.
Every feature, including posts, accounts, following, likes, boosts, events.
All of that is just an extension that can be replaced or forked.
This means communities can assemble their own apps,
enable what they need, disable what they don't, set their own defaults.
And people can create their own extensions,
and easily fork them and customize just a specific feature
without having to maintain an entire fork, which takes a lot of work.
The software then becomes different things in different hands and bonfire
adapts to each context.
No communities need the exact same thing.
And thanks to modularity, we don't have to pretend that they do.
An activity pop is what enables all of that.
It enables features and content to flow between platforms and apps.
And since they're evolving as they go,
the specifications are very rich and extensible.
We can go beyond notes with events, articles, audio,
etc., etc., a whole vocabulary of social forms.
And we're building for communities that don't have a single purpose
and can do whatever they need to do.
We want to support a diversity of needs,
and that's why software needs to be able to be changed
by their users, by people involved.
Communities can become a meeting point,
where everything flows through your space without losing shape.
And people don't have to sign up to a bunch of different places.
This doesn't mean centralizing everything in one place.
It just means that everything is discoverable where you are.
But people can still use the best tool for the job.
If you want to upload a video to appear to you, that's great.
But it can still flow back to your space and not feel disconnected.
But Federation and Contamination depends also beyond code.
Between organizations, between different people,
between different communities, between different ways of working.
Bonfire exists within this web of alliances.
Each of them bringing different expertise.
Each shaping what we are building together.
And here are some example.
Newsman's Foundation, there are UK non-profit.
They build native iOS and Android apps for some community needs.
When a client, like a local community, a publication or a cooperative,
needs a community space.
Newsman's provide them custom mobile application in the app or store.
This means that they have their community name, their identity,
their different content and their members.
Now, in the short future, a custom version of Newsman's.
Nativap will be powered by a bonfire instance.
Federated with the open-source web.
And this means that when clients need new features,
we can coordinate.
We build together and create interoperability through API.
So both bonfire and Newsman's grow together.
Module development means we all benefit and improve.
Lowty, classmate and metoder.
It's a German tech collective.
They build a lowty that is a great calendar and event publication tool
for grassroots organizing.
They're also here in this room.
Events functionality are core needs for most communities.
But we didn't want to remain the wheel in bonfire.
And increase the maintenance burden when there are great open source up available.
So instead, we are collaborating to integrate the tool.
Events will be soon able to federate from lowty to bonfire,
using the activity pipeline to serve very PI more on this later.
And people on the other side can join lowty with their bonfire account
and publish events directly without extra login or silos.
And cop cloud.
Cop cloud is cooperatively governing the comments for self hosting.
They include a simple and reproducible deployment tool called Abra.
And a catalogue of resipes for deploying open source application,
which are maintained collectively, reducing the risk and the maintenance burden for everyone.
Cop cloud is also the recommended way to install bonfire.
And this is because it's also meaning that you can join
a community of cooperative infrastructure.
You are not on your own just installing another app on a server.
And this is all great, but actually, what does it means for real community?
Here are two community that are already building with such infrastructure.
The first is Jacob in the German edition.
It's a political magazine probably most of you know them.
The German edition has 100,000 or more readers.
And they needed a community space that isn't ancient and should be able.
Some where the readers can discuss.
They can organize and connect on ground they control.
We are co-designing this together.
They're a tutorial team.
They're a designer working with the bonfire infrastructure.
But not only us.
They will have a community app that will be built on news must.
They will use the loudty calendar for organizing events.
And their infrastructure will be hosted on cop cloud.
And this is the other.
Another example is topless posts.
Topless is a small town in southwest UK.
And they have a WordPress blog and a place where they post events and create events.
Everything that's happening in town.
And what they're missing is a community.
The community of the town instead is split in like three Facebook groups.
There's like, you know, the forked group that is not fascist.
And there's the other one.
And there's the one that allows ads.
And yeah, everybody hates it.
Everybody would like a lot of people would like to leave.
But there's stuck there because that's where you are involved in the town.
Goings on.
And that's the true.
The case in many towns and neighborhoods around the world.
So they're setting up similarly at app and events to power by loudty.
And with the back end power by bonfire, where they're going to have events and local news.
But also community discussions.
Optionally connected to the rest of the Fediverse, but first focus on just the residents.
So here's how it works.
From the point of view of an event organizer in this case.
Topless cinema, which is a little nonprofit really cool cinema.
That puts on several events every week.
And so here they would be posting an event.
This is the loudty interface for event organizers.
And so they can upload a picture.
They put all the event details in.
Post that.
And then magic happens when you press that button.
Not only is there an event in loudty, but.
And there it is.
But it also federates to bonfire.
And shows up there.
And you can comment on it.
You can boost it, which you cannot usually do with an event.
But here, you know, it's a social thing.
And this is all thanks to client to server API.
A few people talked about it today.
What we realized client to server API.
Even if no client apps are using it.
It's perfect for server to server.
Federation when the app like loudty is not yet federated.
They very quickly were able to implement client to server API.
Just send the event metadata to bonfire.
And then we can federate that on.
And then, of course, it shows up also in a mobile app.
So to sum up what we're offering here.
It's not a product.
It's not a service.
It's an ecosystem of people who meet together.
To meet needs.
People who share costs share risk share expertise in knowledge.
Share governance over the tools they rely on.
And reinforce each other's capacity to adapt surviving thrive.
This is how we think open source can become sustainable.
Not by mimicking startup economics.
But by building ecologies where survival is mutual.
By making sustainability a shared ongoing cooperative project.
Rather than a lonely competition.
Europe today is as a crossroads.
And Sandra talked about earlier really well.
So I'm not going to go into it.
But basically, we think that public funds need to fund.
Not just public code, but public truly public infrastructure.
And that means not just the software.
But also the moderation labor, the maintenance,
localization, accessibility, research, including social science.
To figure out what is the impact of what we're doing and how to improve on that.
So what's coming next for bonfire.
We are working with the social web foundation and with the mystery event.
On implementing end-to-end encryption.
So it means privacy at the protocol level.
And then we really would like to work on federated groups.
And actually we extended the profiting campaign.
And it's active right now.
Mostly used for hopefully funding the federated group development.
And they will work across instances.
They will have it's own governance and their own boundaries and privacy level.
Also bridging, we love the work that the bridge fed and you social are doing.
And we support the federates.
It's not only the only decentralized social network emerging.
Users should be able to talk to all of them if they choose so.
And of course more extension and widget.
We are proposing this idea of having a dashboard that's the logo on page for bonfire.
So the user will not go straight to a timeline to a feed.
But they will have a dashboard that is basically set of components of plugin.
Where all their meaningful data for them will be shown.
And then it will be their own choice to go through a timeline if they want.
Trying to not have a dark pattern enabled by default.
So please get involved.
Try bonfire.
If this resonate.
Run any stance.
See what breaks because bugs.
There are a lot of bugs but we will fix them.
And more of anything tell us.
Build on it.
The extension system is open.
Build what your community really needs.
Form a new alliances.
The ecology that we just described is just one example.
It's one possibility.
Other entanglement.
Other combination can emerge.
We want to hear from you.
And just to wrap up as the beginning we end up with a quote from announcing that really
inspired the bonfire project in a lot of ways.
As contamination change.
Workmaking project.
A new direction may emerge.
Everyone carries a mystery of contamination.
Poority is not an option.
One value of keeping precariety means that it makes us remember the changing with
Shirkostancies is the stuff of survival.
Anatzing studying ecology and capitalism.
About forest.
And about supply chain and survival in the ruins of industrial capitalism.
And of course, she was talking about us.
Thank you.
I'm imagining there's going to be some questions.
Here's one in the front.
Already.
I like to ask if the disadvantage system is already useful.
I can use it this now.
And how it does compare with, for example,
the gantula and molython.
There are similar applications.
And again.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's definitely interalping with Gantula mobiles on the others.
There's a workshop tomorrow if you're interested about that.
Birds of a feather think we're going to participate in.
Yeah.
So in terms of the event park, you can talk to louty in the hall afterwards.
Yeah.
There's birds with a feather tomorrow.
There's two.
Fedabers related ones.
There's a hacky dome one.
A 10 a.m.
And then there's an events.
And calendaring one at 11 a.m.
So if you check the fuzz game schedule.
You should see those as also.
A panel that the executive director from Mastodon is on.
In the EU and pop open source policy debris in tomorrow.
We should probably put a little slide in our.
Holding sections.
Well, in between sessions today just to make sure everybody knew about the other.
Feddy related content.
Any other questions as one from jazz.
Oops.
Hey, guys.
I feel like you slipped in their little tip of an iceberg.
And everyone we have missed something below the surface.
It's a little flavor.
Can you add a little flavor to what you spoke about with the client to server working for you in that particular non-federating application?
Yeah.
So we realize client to server is perfect for apps that haven't yet or maybe won't implement full Federation because that's a huge job, especially to get it right and interrupt with all the other projects.
You know, unless you're using maybe a shared library.
They're starting to be some of those.
The Federation code in bonfire is also available as a library for other projects to use.
But it's still a lot of effort.
So instead, what Laughty does is simply create a JSON and I'm getting technical.
JSON object and activity streams with all the metadata of the event and sending one post request to bonfire with that saying post that to my account.
The account has already been authenticated with OAuth.
So you know, you just click a button and it authenticates.
So it's as simple as that.
You set that up once and then when you post the event on Laughty, it gets pushed to bonfire and then that enables commenting following and all that.
Okay, we'll take one more question and then we'll switch sessions.