Hamish Campbell

2025-02-27 20:49:28

The Beautiful Insanity of Activism: How Movements Rot or Blossom

Let’s face it — activism and counter-culture are packed with “insane” people. And thank the gods for that. It’s what makes movements exciting, dynamic, and, most importantly, effective. But like compost, too much of the wrong stuff makes the pile stink. Balance is everything. So, let’s look at this: what causes a movement to stagnate, fail, or bloom into a riotous field of wildflowers?

The Rot (or: Why Your Movement Smells Bad)

• NGO’ists: These bureaucratic barnacles latch onto everything, molding it into whatever’s fundable and fashionably bland. They hoard resources, fill minds with paperwork, and slowly suffocate radical energy. They’re like termites with business cards.
• Encryptionists: Paranoid fuckists who turn usability into a sin and sell fantasies of invulnerability. They preach security like a cult, but the reality is half-baked systems no one can use and a movement too scared to talk to itself.
• Traditional Media Panderers: Useful in small doses, but quickly start reshaping the movement to fit mainstream narratives. Before you know it, your radical campaign against fossil fuels is being sold as a quirky “green lifestyle choice.”
• Horizontal Dotcom’ists: Desperate to ride the movement into start-up glory. If they build with the #4opens, great. If not, they’re a distraction at best and a flaming wreck at worst when people actually try to use their half-built platforms.
• Insecure and Nasty Lifestylists: Attracted to successful grassroots projects like flies to rot. They thrive on internal drama and are fed by the media panderers. Enough of them and your movement eats itself alive.
• Hidden Careerists: Often competent and useful — until they start networking with the NGO’ists and media grifters to build personal brands instead of movements.
• Paranoid Fuckwits: The paranoid glue of grassroots campaigns. In small doses, they help keep things tight. But let them accumulate in leadership, and the infighting becomes an art form.
• Dogmatic Liberals: Lovely people, but the human equivalent of wet blankets. They block anything genuinely disruptive because it makes them uncomfortable, ensuring nothing truly radical gets off the ground.

The Bloom (or: Why the Garden Still Grows)

• Hands-off NGO’s: The quiet good ones. They funnel resources without sucking the life out of movements. A rare species, but precious.
• User-Focused KISS Peer2Peer’ists: The heroes fighting uphill to (re)boot the #openweb with simple, human-centered tools. They understand that people need tech they can actually use, not just theorize about.
• Traditional Media Outreaches: The rare media people who amplify grassroots work without distorting it to fit mainstream appetites. They build bridges, not cages.
• Horizontal Dotcoms (Done Right): Working on open, federated sustainability instead of chasing VC cash. They build tools for the movement, not to sell the movement.
• Healthy Lifestylists: Learning to balance intense campaigning with actual human joy. Letting go of burnout culture and building connected, grounded lives.
• Open Careerists: Using the movement to bootstrap themselves — but carrying open values like a Trojan horse into the belly of institutions. Someone has to infiltrate the beast.
• Secure Organising Crews: Understanding that collective security is a shared responsibility. Keeping things calm, focused, and handling offline realities without spiraling into paranoia.
• Liberal Liberals: The ones who bring just enough common sense to stop things from exploding, but not so much that they kill the spark.

The Chaotic Harmony

Activism is inherently messy, and that’s its strength. The magic happens in the balancing act. A movement with too many paranoid fuckwits or NGO’ists collapses under its own weight. But a movement with a little bit of everything — the wild-eyed dreamers, the practical builders, the media-savvy storytellers, and the steady hands keeping it all together — can actually change the world.

Because, at the end of the day, movements grow like compost. You need some rot. You need some shit. But you also need people willing to shovel through it, plant seeds, and tend the garden. And maybe, just maybe, you need to be a little bit mad to stick around long enough to see it bloom.

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Bonfire

2025-07-08 13:43:02

🔥 Bonfire Social 1.0 RC2

We’re pleased to announce Bonfire Social 1.0 Release Candidate 2! This update is all about refining and polishing the experience, fixing bugs, and making Bonfire more enjoyable and reliable for everyone. These improvements come directly from your feedback, bug reports, and real-world testing.

Of course, we couldn’t help ourselves and also snuck in some exciting new features—like long-form article publishing and more feeds customisations, plus plenty of interface refinements for both desktop and mobile.

A huge thank you to everyone who has set up a Bonfire instance, or joined the campground (our local-only testing space) to try out the app. Your suggestions and bug reports have been invaluable as we approach version 1.0. Please keep testing, sharing feedback, and helping us shape the future of federated social spaces!

✨ What’s new and improved?

• Long-form publishing: Going beyond beyond short posts to read and write in-depth articles, ideal for essays, announcements, or detailed content. Article feeds are now available for RSS readers.
• Smarter feeds: New feed options for events, books, and articles help you discover what matters to you most. You can now also filter out your own activities from your feeds when desired.
• Multi-profiles overview: A new navigation menu can display all your profiles with notification indicators, allowing quick profile switching.
• Private by default: New Bonfire instances start as invite-only, giving admins control over membership from day one.
• Interface improvements: We've refined the user experience, enhanced notifications and ensured posts display properly across mobile devices.
• More reliable: Tons of fixes for authentication, media uploads, mentions, moderation, and other core features.

Additional improvements include:

• Better translation and localization workflow
• Smoother OAuth/OpenID login and SSO support
• Updated documentation and guides for admins and contributors
• Enhanced S3 integration for uploads
• Lots of small bug fixes on comment threads, messaging, settings, and more

For a comprehensive list of changes, see the full changelog.

🎪 Community contributions and other initiatives

• We hosted our first install party using coop-cloud, with all participants who followed along successfully deploying their own Bonfire instances.
• Seperately, ozoned from Fireside Fedi livestreamed their installation attempt, surfacing valuable setup challenges. This highlighted the need to simplify Docker deployment and improve documentation. Contributors are welcome to help make this easier!
• Sciety deployed a Bonfire instance as part of their pre-print review project.
• @spark464@spark.box464.social published an article on how to add a weather widget in Bonfire.

🌍 Localisation: Bonfire in your language!

Bonfire Social is built to be diverse and welcoming, which means making it accessible in as many languages as possible. Thanks to our amazing translators, Bonfire is now available in several languages.

🏅 Top translated languages

- Portuguese (Brazil): 100% translated & reviewed 🎉

- French: 98.9% translated, 69.4% reviewed

- Italian: 96.7% translated, 54% reviewed

- German: 98% translated

- Spanish: 57% translated

- Vietnamese: 20.9% translated, 11.1% reviewed

- ...and several more, including Catalan, Cantonese and Taiwanese.

Want to help Bonfire speak your language? Please join us and make a difference for communities worldwide!

🤝 Help needed

As we push toward 1.0, we're facing some specific challenges where community support and contributions would make a real difference:

• DevOps expertise: We need help streamlining the Docker installation process to make Bonfire more accessible to new users. If you have experience with containerisation and deployment workflows, your contributions would be invaluable.
• Elixir developers: Join us in improving Bonfire's stability and performance. We're focused on eliminating bugs and enhancing the core extensions' reliability.
• Financial support: As a small team of two working full-time on Bonfire, we need community support to sustain development. You can contribute through our Open Collective page.
• Federation testing: We're seeking users willing to set up Bonfire instances and try out federation and interoperability with other fediverse platforms. Your real-world testing helps ensure Bonfire works seamlessly across the fediverse.
• Translation: Please join us or share this with your multilingual friends!

These are our most pressing needs as we approach 1.0. If you can help with any of these areas, please get in touch via the fediverse, Matrix chat, or GitHub. Every contribution, big or small, helps make Bonfire better for everyone.

🙏 Thank you!

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed translations and reviews. You are lighting up Bonfire for people everywhere! Here are some of our awesome translators:

> Gilles Dutilh, Ahmad Dakhlallah, Lamparina Coletivo, alan ptm, Antonio Irre, Zulfikar A, CDN, cranio_is_thinking, Steven Bond, Diego KehrleSousa, Vrlo Vazno, Ed, Andrei Guliaikin, Hendra Wahyu T, Hippie Gschpängschtli, House of Olivier EU, Ivan Minutillo, Juan García, Lapineige, Pascal Schmid, Martin Frost, Duy, Mayel de Borniol, Sovversivo Anonimo, Peter Kvillegård, Poesty Li, Sergio Guidoux, Vaclovas lntas, Williams Melgar, and many more!

We really appreciate your work! 💜

And a massive thank you to everyone who contributed code, ideas, testing, translations, and support—including @spark464@spark.box464.social , @tommi@pan.rent, @lechindianer@sueden.social , @fishinthecalculator@bonfire.fishinthecalculator.me , @dumpsterqueer@gts.superseriousbusiness.org , @ozoned@social.ozoned.net.

Thanks to those that are taking time to test drive Bonfire on our demo instance and provide feedback, such as @[url=https://pawb.social/u/liquidparasyte]liquidparasyte[/url], @[url=https://chaos.social/users/rincewind]🌈 🇺🇦 Jörg Matysiak[/url], @[url=https://mastodon.social/users/youronlyone]♾️ Yuki (스노 雪亮) 🐬 🦣[/url], @coyote...

Thanks to @nlnet@social.nlnet.nl for supporting the Bonfire development, all our Open Collective donors and our amazing community as a whole.

Bonfire is a collaborative project, and we’re grateful to build it with you .

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Ready to try Bonfire 1.0 RC2?

- Get started

- Try our demo instance

- Provide feedback

- Chat with us on the fediverse: @Bonfire@bonfire.cafe

- Chat with us on Matrix

Let’s light up the fediverse together! 🚀

The Bonfire translation project on Transifex

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