Choosing a Bonfire Flavour

Bonfire is modular and comes in several "flavours"—predefined bundles of extensions and settings tailored for different types of communities and use cases.

What is a Bonfire Flavour?

Each flavour is essentially a separate app—a curated set of features, extensions, and default settings. Flavours are designed to suit particular styles of community or activity, such as:

• Social: A classic social network experience, similar to Mastodon or Twitter at first glance, with posts and follows, but also circles and boundaries. This is the most familiar flavour for people coming from other fediverse platforms. It supports microblogging and long-form blogging, public and private posts, content warnings, and rich privacy controls. (1.0 Release Candidate)
• Open Science: Aimed at researchers, academics, and open science communities. Includes features for sharing publications and discussions around scientific work. (Beta)
• Community: Focused 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 collective moderation. (Alpha)
• Coordination: Designed for teams or networks that need to coordinate tasks, events, and shared goals. Features include task boards and collaborative decision-making tools. (Alpha)
• Cooperation: For organizations, co-ops, or mutual aid groups that want to manage and share resources. This flavour supports more complex governance and tools for managing collective assets, production, and exchange. (Prototype)
• Ember: 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.

How do I choose a flavour?

• When deploying Bonfire, the instance admin selects a flavour that matches your community’s needs. When joining an instance, you can choose one with a flavour that fits your needs.
• The flavour determines which extensions are enabled by default, but you can always add or remove extensions later.
• You can switch flavours or customize your instance at any time.

Why does this matter?

• 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.
• As your needs change, you can enable more features or switch to a different flavour.

Where do I set the flavour?

• The flavour is set during installation or in your instance’s configuration (see the Hosting Guide for details).

Can I customize further?

Absolutely! Flavours are just starting points. You can enable or disable Bonfire extensions (and if you're hosting your own instance, you can install other extensions not included in the flavour), adjust settings, and even develop your own plugins to fit your community’s unique needs.

Choosing the right flavour helps you and your community get the most out of Bonfire from day one!