I posted this on my federated account but I'll report here. snowdin.town/notice/AWmsURDe...
I took a look at Bonfire recently and it looks promising. It has the idea of Circles which is one of my most desired features on fedi, so you can organize your followers into meaningful groups and make posts visible to them. There's two things that I'm struggling with there though.
One is terminology, the interface has a feed for 'Activities' and a feed for 'Posts', I don't know what those mean. Similarly the permissions system ('Roles') uses multiple terms that are hard for me to remember ('Read', 'Interact', 'Participate', 'Contribute'). The last three in particular all sound like they mean the same thing to me.
The other problem I'm having is that these permission roles are themselves adjustable. You can open up each one and toggle individual actions. That's a pretty cool idea from a customization perspective but it means that the labels themselves are now meaningless. That is, 'Interact' will mean different things to each user. Also, these permissions operate at different levels. 'Request', 'Follow', 'Mention', and 'Message' apply to users, but the rest apply to posts. So when I'm creating a post and I set the permissions to 'Participate' for a given Circle, am I giving users new permissions to interact with my account? Or am I controlling their permissions just on that post? The blending of these levels is really confusing to me.
I think it's a great idea to build more precise permissions around requests and follows, but I think that should probably be a separate section of the config. Post permissions should be relevant only to posts. I think it might also be nice if these default permission categories were not configurable, so that they meant the same thing to everyone on the network. Custom categories could be created by the user if they want more fine-tuned options.
All in all I'm still pretty impressed and glad that someone is thinking about these things. I like the frontend a lot.
