Post by @gilles@campground.bonfire.cafe

Great to see so much development @ivan !

I have a qustion for a specific use case (could also ask this somewhere else, but why not here):

Say, I set up a rather local-focused bonfire instance, for example, inviting all people from my small village to have an account. I would like to be able to:
1) Post my opinion about, say, synthesizers to be read by people from all known instances. (and of course let all villager post about whatever they find interesting)
2) Allow villagers to post stuff about our village that is only visible for people in the village. For example, I could invite people for helping organizing a cleanup day in the village hall. If I understand correctly, this would be done by setting the boundary to local on my village instance.
3) On my instance, I would like to offer all accounts a default custom feed that only shows local stuff (as posted under point 2). Most villagers don't care about my opinion about synthesizers, they just wanna see what's going on in the village. (so, that is different from the current default "local" feed)

I would really love it when this third option would be possible. The literal example given here would be a serious use case, but I can think of many more.

16 Replies

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Mayel

@mayel last wk.

@gilles thanks again for the suggestion, this feed is now available: campground.bonfire.cafe/feed... (which you can pin to your sidebar in feed settings)

Bonfire community

This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes

9 months earlier

Ian

@Ianp5a 9 mo. ago

@mayel @gilles @ivan

Groups is what is missing from Mastodon. Real Groups that is. Where posts inside a group stay inside a group. You join or leave the group if you are not interested in that topic. Same as Matrix Rooms or Telgram groups. Currently Mastodon is just a stream of announcements and no real social connection. Individual threads are OK. But you'll never find that thread again after a few days.

Groups mean people can post in detail on that topic without woryying it'll bore their followers. People have multiple different topics that need not overlap.

Groups make a social connection. You'll get to know people.

Jesper Ross Stocholm

@jrossstocholm 9 mo. ago

@Ianp5a @mayel @gilles @ivan isn't that what "Circles" on bonfire are supposed to do?

If we want ppl to move from #bigtech (and I belive that we want this) we need to provide an alternative - that is on-par with the most important parts of e.g., Facebook. One of those important parts is indeed "groups". If this is not present, noone will move.

Btw, I created a Circle - but cannot figure out how to post to that circle?

Coyote

@coyote 9 mo. ago

@jrossstocholm

My understanding is that Circles are how you set the privacy levels or interaction permissions for individual posts, which is a different kind of feature from Facebook groups.

Jesper Ross Stocholm

@jrossstocholm 9 mo. ago

@coyote @Ianp5a @mayel @gilles @ivan but isn't that essentially the same thing? I know that groups on Facebook has many other features - but the idea of creating a group of people that can share ideas is the same.

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Mayel

@mayel 10 mo. ago

@gilles @ivan oh that's an interesting idea! yeah the current local feed is simply activities from local users, but being able to filter using the boundary could be useful indeed!

ivan minutillo

@ivan 10 mo. ago

@gilles @mayel super interesting, wonder how much of overlaps woudl have with groups...

gilles

@gilles 10 mo. ago

@ivan @mayel I of course don't understand the exact architecture, but one thing that I can image that could be a challenge is that the "village only feed" contains posts based on a property of their boundary ("only for villagers"). If I understand correctly: as a villager who is allowed to read a post with this boundary, I only know that I am allowed to read, not that the it has boundary "only for villagers". Or do I?

Mayel

@mayel 10 mo. ago

@gilles @ivan You can't see details of user's preset boundaries, circles, or custom boundaries, but for standard ones like Public and Local we've chosen to display those, so shouldn't be a blocker for this feed...

gilles

@gilles 10 mo. ago

@ivan @mayel by the way: is "groups" a concept in bonfire social?

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Mayel

@mayel 10 mo. ago

@gilles @ivan We have a work-in-progress implementation of groups but that will be in the community flavour: bonfirenetworks.org/apps/

Jesper Ross Stocholm

@jrossstocholm 9 mo. ago

@coyote @Ianp5a @mayel @gilles @ivan I am trying really hard to understand bonfire 😊.

When you say that "Bonfire community" will have groups - does that mean that it will be a different version of Bonfire - and different from "Bonfire social"?

So, for comparisons to #bigtech:

Bonfire Social --> Twitter (micro-blogging)
Bonfire Community --> Facebook

I am in no way saying that it is a bad thing, but just to compare, pixelfed is the brand name of the platform where users can chose where to sign up. But it's the same app. But bonfire will more likely be a "powered by bonfire" where whatever brand name will be on top and bonfire will be the underlying infrastructure/core?

A bit like PPBoard was back in the day 😊

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pbboard/

Mayel

@mayel 9 mo. ago

@jrossstocholm @coyote @Ianp5a @gilles @ivan Sort of yeah! If you're familiar with Linux you could also compare bonfire flavours to Linux distributions. They may share a lot of the same software but make different choices about what's included, the default configs, etc. Also some flavours are created/maintained by us and some will be governed autonomously by other groups...

gilles

@gilles 10 mo. ago

@mayel @ivanI am currently trying whether I can do this with boundaries and circles. Honestly, I find the connecting concepts boundaries and circles really hard to grasp. They seem to be implemented so generically (which is GREAT) that I have difficulties navigating.

Mayel

@mayel 10 mo. ago

@gilles yeah that's understandable! we still have a way to go with UX, in-app explanations, and docs. We've started drafting this document if you have any feedback on it: docs.bonfirenetworks.org/bou...

gilles

@gilles 10 mo. ago

@mayel great, I will have a look at it. I would love to contribute! As a psychologist and teacher with some experience in R package development, I may actually be of a little help.

1 more reply