blaine

RE: https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/115507615653471686

What @bonfire@indieweb.social are working on is impressive and important and y'all should consider supporting their crowdfunder!

Bonfire was absolutely the top contender for my work building New_ Public's Local project (https://newpublic.org/local); in the end, I'm building mostly from scratch not because Bonfire isn't great, but because I wanted our team's 2+ years of research, planning, and design to lead the conversation, not the technology.

BUT we're in a unique spot. Most communities could use Bonfire.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@wearenew_public/115645917115143165

Six months ago, I joined New_ Public to help build a new social platform for local communities. Today, I could't be more excited and proud to share what our amazing little team has cooked up, and is launching in closed beta this week.

This isn’t another toxic, chaotic space — Roundabout is designed to be useful, fun, and helpful and it isn’t motivated by stealing your data and selling you stuff.

Learn more at https://joinroundabout.com

RE: https://jaz.co.uk/2026/01/13/there-is-one-fediverse-there-are-a-thousand-ways-to-join-it/

This is the way.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@wearenew_public/115729800203396909

We've been working hard over the past six months to ship Roundabout to our pilot communities. It's amazing to see them come to life, and I'm so excited to keep building & learning to support healthy online spaces for local communities. 💖

This is awesome: https://social.sciences.re/@RGrunblatt/109342061792478407

Folks are crowdsourcing GDPR compliance playbooks for Mastodon instances. Because of course they are. ❤️

(I still want RTs, sorry not sorry)

Canadians: am I out of line for thinking that an NDP (union-left, for those outside of Canada) politician probably shouldn't re-post Theresa May talking about the lack of civil discourse being the result of digital platforms, and positing that what we need is more gatekeeping of who gets to speak? 🫣

@emma@orbital.horse @ben@werd.social there will be ActivityPub. 💜

One thing that's interesting, though, is that for "big world" social media, the value of interop is immediately clear. For small communities where the goal is the shared space itself, the value of decentralization is less obvious and getting the UX right becomes an even bigger challenge.

We're excited to properly explore these questions in the new year, though!

@emma@orbital.horse @mat @ben@werd.social not sure if Emma will see this reply either, but thankful for the observation and that when we do explore "out-of-silo experiences" 👽 we'll be making sure to reach as diverse as set of networks as possible, in support of our goal to really empower stewards, communities, and their members. 💜

Basically, instead of QTing something, on Mastodon it's possible to reply to a post and then boost your reply.

That way, the visibility is the same as a Quote would have been, but with the interesting property that the OP doesn't get silenced/steamrolled, but the original post is still easily visible. More conversational, less adversarial.