It's Time to Savor the Flavours of Bonfire

This article explores Bonfire Flavours, the platform’s starter apps targeted to specific types of communities. It originally appeared on The Fulcrum's official website.

In the May 8, 2026 The Programmers Fulcrum we announced the beginning of development work on our Manade project with a co-op. It will be built on the Bonfire platform and you will hear more about it over the coming months, starting today.

Manade will function as an opinionated (blueprint, template, example, starter-kit, etc.) instance for communities to (hopefully) get a quick and easy installation of Bonfire up and running. They can then customize it to meet their needs and goals.

Our goal is to have something you can build off of in 2027.

Bonfire is aimed at communities and can permit completely private instances. This is what Manade will be. It's not for the masses. That's what Fediverse platforms like Mastodon or ATProto ones like Eurosky, Blacksky, Northsky, etc. are built for. At the same time any Bonfire instance will be a community, not a silo. There are differences of opinions in communities.

If you think of public instances as pubs, you can think of Bonfire instances as clubs. But not the rave type.🕺 One is open to the general public and the other requires a membership. And in turn that membership may have requirements.

A great aspect of Bonfire is that you can seamlessly migrate your entire social presence (including posts, follows, circles, and bookmarks) between instances with import tools and a migration dashboard.

Finally, if the community wants it (and the administrators allow it) you still have the option to interact with millions of users across Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, and the wider Fediverse using ActivityPub. When enabled, protocol bridges also connect you with the Atmosphere and beyond.

We want to provide a tool for future communities to support local individuals, groups, and alternative small businesses that take power away from extractive big capital, enshittifying big tech, and abusive big government. 🏴‍☠️ ⛓️‍💥 🛠️

Anyway, in this article we'll explore Bonfire Flavours.

What is a Bonfire Flavour?

As I wrote in Grab a seat at our Bonfire: the revolutionary community platform , Bonfire will eventually have multiple options for new installations. These apps called Flavours are a curated set of features, extensions, and default settings. Flavours are designed to suit particular styles of communities or their activities.

They are set during installation or via an instance’s configuration. However, they are just starting points. You can enable or disable Bonfire extensions. If you're hosting your own instance, you can even install other extensions not included in the flavour.

Flavours allow the adjustment of settings and the development of plugins to fit your community’s unique needs.

So, here are Bonfires flavours and the stage of development they are in:

Ember (which is basic and stable if you want to customize Bonfire)

Social (which is recommended and in Beta)

Open Science (Beta)

Community (which is in Alpha)

Coordination for teams (Alpha)

Cooperation for organizations, co-ops, or mutual aid groups (Prototype)

Federated Archives for the Federated Archives Alliance (Prototype)

As an example, the Social flavor would be similar to other Fediverse apps.

Since Manade's purpose is to support communities against techno feudalism and surveillance capitalism, our blueprint will use the Community flavour. Plus, a manade is a semi-wild herd of horses led by a gardian in the Camargue area in France.

Herd / community. Gardian / administrator. Get it.

The Community flavor features group spaces and collaborative moderation. Again, these are features unique to Bonfire.

The Flavours

Ember

This app is a minimal, privacy-focused flavour with only core features enabled. Ideal for individuals or small groups who want a lightweight, distraction-free experience, or who care most about privacy and simplicity. All the remaining flavors will have Ember's capabilities.

Social

This app will be familiar to most social network users. While similar to Mastodon or other Fediverse microblogging platforms (posts, follows, etc.) it also has circles, boundaries, and groups. In addition, it supports long-form blogging, both public and private posts, custom feeds, content warnings, and rich privacy and security controls.

Bonfire Social is also your gateway into the Fediverse while staying self-hostable and community-governed.

Features

Let's explore the Social flavour's features.

Custom feeds allow users to filter and sort by content type, circle, date, engagement, source instance, and more. You can save presets and arrange them however you prefer.

Circles are lists of people (community friends, teams, mutual aid groups, etc.) with their own feed comprising posts from the circle members. Users create their circles. And they can only include members of the instance if desired.

Boundaries allow you to choose who can see, reply, quote, or even edit a post. For example a user could make a post public but accept replies only from a specific circle. Boundaries are compatible with GoToSocial interaction controls and Mastodon quote authorizations.

All of the Flavours below will have most of social's capabilities.

If you want to sample this familiar flavour, visit https://campground.bonfire.cafe.

Open Science

This app was created for researchers, academics, and open science communities. It was one of Bonfire's first projects and includes features for sharing publications and discussions around scientific work.

And it demonstrates the flexibility, customizing potential, and componentization capabilities of the platform. Thus, it has the most features out of the box.

Features

Users can federate with Mastodon and Bluesky and integrate their social graph with scholarly data. They can also transform any conversation into citable FAIR data with persistent identifiers.

Members can sign in with ORCID, Zenodo, or an institutional SSO. Publications, affiliations, and research interests can be imported directly from sources like ORCID and OpenAlex.

Posts and conversations may receive DOIs and become citable FAIR objects. Meaningful user exchanges can be preserved as part of the scholarly record (not lost in private threads) through integrations with a growing list of repositories.

Members can share papers and see them come alive where metadata, co-authors, datasets, and related works appear instantly. Colleagues can join the conversation no matter what platforms they use.

Finally, you may add repository connectors, peer review workflows, or research tools as your community evolves.

Sample this sophisticated flavour at https://sandbox.openscience.network.

Community

This app focuses on group collaboration and shared spaces. Ideal for neighbourhoods, clubs, or grassroots groups who want to organize, discuss, and make decisions together. Includes group spaces and importantly collective moderation.

The community flavour facilitates coordinated activities, topical discussions, and more nuanced governance structures. It includes Groups for flexible discussions and Topics for organized conversation. This capability promotes clarity and focus along with the flexibility to set specific visibility and permission levels.

Members can create public and private groups for wide-reaching discussions or confidential, selective conversations. This flexibility supports both inclusive community engagement and private interactions.

Users can also organize discussions in topics. This functionality allows categorization of discussions into distinct topics. It has the benefit of encouraging focused dialogue and easier navigation through group activities.

In addition, community members can create and assign roles in groups. This feature allows for personalized management of group dynamics and responsibilities. Role assignment enables tailored governance structures within communities, enhancing both organization and user experience.

The community flavour will allow Manade to have minimal moderation headaches, and maximum freedom from governmental regulations. Because it will be private and will only accept new members from existing member invitations. Preferably, it can require more than one member to invite someone to join. Of course, upon appeal admins will be able to add new members directly in order to avoid cliques and discrimination.

Coordination

This app is tailored for teams or networks that need to coordinate tasks, events, and shared goals. Features include task boards and collaborative decision-making tools.

So, it's perfect for ActivityPub developers. 😈

With federated Kanban boards and task management, this flavor can enhance team efficiency and empower individual users. Coordination uses the ValueFlows open economic vocabulary, offering the potential to foster decentralized and cooperative workflows.

Cooperation

This app is for communities requiring co-operative tools. It too uses the ValueFlows open economic vocabulary.

Members can manage and share resources. And this flavour supports more complex governance and tools for managing collective assets, production, and exchange.

Again, it's just a prototype for now.

Federated Archive Alliance

This app connects and empowers public media archives worldwide. It enables archives to maintain autonomy while participating in a collaborative network. The flavour also allows their collections to be discoverable and accessible across the Fediverse.

It facilitates seamless sharing of movie catalogs between participating archives, with granular permission controls that respect each organization's policies.

Curators, researchers, and other authorized members can search across the federated network, create curated collections, and contribute to the curation of metadata. All while preserving the provenance of each item.

It's also just a prototype.

How do you choose a flavour?

When joining Bonfire, users choose an instance with a flavour that fits their individual needs. So, this is an important decision that merits some research. You can always migrate, but it's better to start with an instance where you will feel comfortable.

For a new community an instance's flavour determines which extensions are enabled by default. But administrators can always add or remove extensions later. Again, they can switch flavours or customize the instance at any time.

Wrapping it up

As you have seen, Flavours make it easy to get started with the right set of tools for your community. You don’t need to be an expert to launch a Bonfire instance that fits your goals. And we hope our Manade project will provide some guidance and an easier launch process for your community.

Like the Bonfire platform itself, Flavours are incredibly flexible, customizable, and extensible.

Choose one that will let you savor the satisfying and nourishing banquet your community will provide.

Thanks for reading and start a bonfire today.

P.S.

Too learn more about Bonfire, read our article Grab a seat at our Bonfire: the revolutionary community platform .

You can also explore TAM and OMN tools for potential Bonfire workflows.