Fediverse Report – #126

The News

Bandwagon is a fediverse platform for artists to share their music, similar to platforms like Bandcamp. Artists can now use Bandwagon to sell their music albums with the latest update. Bandwagon has added support for Stripe, and does not charge a payment fee for albums sold via the platform. Selling albums via Bandwagon will not be completely free however: once Bandwagon Premier launches at the end of the year, selling albums will only be available for this premium subscription tier of $10/month. Bandwagon promises the platform will always be available for free for artists to upload and share their albums. Another new feature for Bandwagon is Circles, which allows users to share content with specific people. When you add accounts to a circle, you can create content that will only be visible to people within that circle, similar to how Bonfire’s boundaries system works. What is different about Bandwagon’s circles is that access to a circle can be put behind a paywall, where people can pay a monthly subscription fee for continued inclusion in that circle and to see exclusive content by the artist.

The upcoming premium subscription will give paying members the ability to sell albums, sell access to circles/memberships, and get higher quality streaming. Some further thoughts:

• With circles, Bandwagon is placing itself in competition with Patreon. It is not the first project to try to put fediverse content behind a paywall: sub.club tried to make this work last year and had to shut down due to a limited uptake. Sub.club focused on microblogging and Mastodon, will targeting the music sector make a difference for Bandwagon?
• Platforms on the fediverse has historically struggled with becoming financially sustainable, with most relying on donations, grants and volunteer labour. Bandwagon has a clear story on how it plans to become a financially sustainable platform. The big question is: can they pull it off?
• One of the major challenges in building a new social network is in getting critical mass on the community size to made sure there is enough interesting content to keep users interested in visiting. Projects like Radio Free Fedi show that the fediverse has a dedicated community of musicians and other artists on the fediverse. Bandwagon also already has over 200 artists who are sharing their music on the platform. It indicates that music and artists might be a worthwhile direction to look for when building critical mass in communities.
• How much will the connection to the fediverse matter for artists on Bandwagon? Bandwagon is open-source and encourages self-hosting, and that it uses ActivityPub provides clear value for creating a network of interoperable Bandwagon servers. But will people use the native connections with the rest of the fediverse as well? For artists, having a wider reach is beneficial, especially if they are selling albums. But will people use the interoperability of microblogging platforms like Mastodon to follow artists on Bandcamp, or will these interoperable networks stay mostly separate in practice?

Bonfire is an upcoming modular social networking platofrm that the team is working on getting ready for an official release. In the launch version (‘Bonfire Social’) the platform focuses on features that are more familiar to microblogging and long-form writing, but the platform is highly extendable and customisable: Bonfire is also experimenting with adding geodata and Mosaic, a bridge to connect other datasets to the platform. Bonfire also reported that they have their first organisation that will build their community on Bonfire: CrowdInBlue is a platform that wants to “connect water projects with funding sources”, and they will build this platform using Bonfire.

The Links

“The upside is that moderation gives me some control. Watching a fascist autocracy unfold before your eyes is terrifying. Everything is collapsing on a massive scale in myriad ways. It’s enough to make a person feel helpless. While it’s not monumental, I do get to curb some of that fascism through moderation. I get to push buttons with labels that read “delete post” and “suspend.” When some ignorant sociopath is harassing people, I get to wave a magic wand and make them disappear. At least from our corner of Mastodon. That’s empowering. And meaningful. It does make a difference because I get to silence them. I can’t begin to describe how good that feels. Just a little tiny bit of justice.”

An excellent writeup of what it’s like to be a moderator for Mastodon. It explains what the day-to-day experience of being a moderator on Mastodon is like, and what some of the main challenges are, such as dealing with targeted harassment and getting exposed to traumatic content. The quote above highlights why people put up with these challenges, and indicates the value of a social network that gives people agency.

• Being a Mastodon Moderator – Mark Writes

“I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don’t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis—in a world where, as one friend related this week, newbies can ask an LLM for advice on exploring their kinks, and the machine tells them to try solo breath play. In this world I think woof.group, and many forums like it, will collapse.“

A worrying account of how LLMs make the current systems of keeping spam out of closed social networks unfeasible. There are communities who need some form of anonymity of their members to function, such as the queer kink community woof.group. These communities ask for some form of applications by new members. The ability of LLMs to cheaply generate bullshit on a grand scale is being used spammers to join these private communities and use it for spam. There is a clear need for new ways to build and maintain communities while keeping spammers out, and it is currently unclear how such a system would look like.

• The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess – Aphyr

“My goals now are more modest: planting seeds in people’s minds that another way to interact online is possible. And when people ARE READY and willing, help them set up an account on the Fediverse software best suited for their needs, helping them out and acclimatizing them to the culture of this place.“

Elena Rossini writes about how her thoughts on the fediverse and growth have shifted, and her plans for the next year of her blog. It echoes a trend I wrote recently about as well: the previous conceptualisation of growth for the new social networks does not hold up anymore, and we need new stories on how these networks can be used to build new communication structures.

• The Future is Federated: Year 2 – Elena Rossini

And some more links:

• Trunk & Tidbits, June 2025 – Mastodon
• Community Spotlight: Mastodon – Geeks for Social Change Community
• Privacy and Security on Mastodon – Privacyguides.org
• How to Install and Set Up Castopod for Your Podcast – Randy Black
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• ActivityPub Explorer is a tool that takes any ActivityPub content like a profile or post, and shows the entire underlying ActivityPub structure.

connectedplaces.online/reports…

Bonfire

2025-07-15 10:03:55

Connect your existing tools to the fediverse with Mosaic

Your organisation's favorite apps, now with superpowers.

We all navigate a constellation of specialized tools daily. Organisations depend on CRMs, project management platforms, and financial systems. Communities coordinate through forums, chat and event platforms, and resource-sharing databases. Individuals track their lives across fitness apps, reading lists, streaming services, knowledge management tools and more.

Each app serves its purpose, but they each create isolated silos where valuable activities, insights, and connections remain trapped behind separate logins and walled gardens.

What if you could keep using the tools built for your needs while opening them to your community or the broader fediverse according to your specific rules and boundaries?

🧰 Bridge your tools to the open web

Through our Mosaic initiative, leveraging the Bonfire modular framework, we offer like-minded organizations and communities the opportunity to build custom extensions that connect their homegrown or third-party applications to the fediverse. These bridges:

• Import data from your existing tools
• Transform it into rich ActivityPub activities for federation
• Enable meaningful, two-way interactions
• Respect your privacy boundaries and governance needs

The result? Your isolated tools become part of a connected, collaborative ecosystem.

Real-world examples: your tools, federated

Project management meets community feedback

Imagine your team uses a kanban board to manage development sprints. With a custom Bonfire extension, we could connect the service's API and monitor specific triggers like completed tasks, cards tagged with #feedback, or comments added.

When triggered, the extension would create ActivityPub objects with rich metadata: task description, relevant links, and progress context. Your fediverse followers would receive these as native posts they can react to, boost, and comment on. Their feedback would flow back through the extension as comments on the original card.

You would control the boundaries granularly, e.g. public for open source projects, followers-only for beta features, restricted to your instance for internal work, or anything in between. The two-way sync would ensure your project management tool remains the single source of truth while your community becomes an active participant in the development process.

Community resources go network-wide

Your mutual aid network could maintain a resource spreadsheet or database tracking offers, needs, and availability. Our extension would poll for new entries or status changes (by connecting to an API, listening to webhooks, or even directly reading the database or spreadsheet itself), converting them into structured ActivityPub objects with standardised properties for location and resource type taxonomy tags, and custom properties for quantity and urgency.

When someone marks "10 wool blankets available" or "urgent: need baby formula," it would federate as a rich post that other instances can parse intelligently. Neighboring mutual aid groups would see these in dedicated feeds or maps, filtered by resource type or geographic proximity.

The extension could handle resource matching across networks, suggesting possible connections between needs and offers while respecting each network's autonomy.

Events that travel beyond platform borders

Your organisation's calendar contains everything from public conferences to internal meetings. The extension would connect via calendar APIs (CalDAV, Google Calendar API, etc.) and intelligently parse event metadata: detecting whether events are public, extracting registration links, and identifying capacity limits.

Public events would become rich ActivityPub Event objects that federated platforms can display natively—Mobilizon and Bonfire instances would show them in event listings, Mastodon users would see them as interactive posts. RSVPs would flow back through via ActivityPub federation, updating your attendee count in real-time.

The extension could handle timezone conversions, recurring events, and last-minute changes. When you update event details, it would send an update to ensure all federated copies stay synchronised.

The possibilities are endless

Imagine federating your collaborative playlists to spark music discovery across communities. Or sharing fitness milestones that inspire distributed workout challenges. Or creating transparent financial reporting that builds trust with your supporter network.

Ready to give your tools superpowers?

The examples above showcase just a glimpse of what's possible when we bridge isolated tools to the fediverse. While these specific integrations are just ideas, they represent the transformative potential of Bonfire, and we're ready to build them with you.

Mosaic is a unique service where the Bonfire team works with you to co-design and build custom extensions entirely shaped around your community's needs.

Mosaic is perfect for you if:

• You're frustrated by data trapped in isolated platforms
• Your community wants to participate more but faces too many barriers
• You believe in transparency and collaborative approaches
• You're ready to pioneer new models of digital cooperation

What we offer:

• Custom extension development tailored to your specific tools and workflows
• Full control over privacy boundaries and federation rules
• Ongoing support as your needs evolve
• The opportunity to be among the first to explore federated tool integration

Let's start a conversation.

Whether you want to federate your project management, open up your resource database, or imagine entirely new possibilities, we're here to build it with you. Your use case could become the next example inspiring others to break down their digital silos.

Book a call with us or contact us at team@bonfire.cafe.

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