In a world of “move fast and break things,” we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.
In open source circles, a technical description of what a tool does might be the norm, but in many other spaces, signaling your values and ideology is more important than the technicalities. For you it’s buzzwords, for other people it means a very specific positioning.
A technical description?
I don’t know the first thing about Bonfire. I literally only know its name, and even then, I’m not sure if it’s even an it.
It might be an organisation, a single tool, a framework, a development environment, a service, I genuinely don’t know.
A “mission-driven project” is a meaningless phrase that can be applied to almost anything.
Positioning what?
Positioning the project. Putting the project’s value before the tool it produces or the problem it solves is a specific stylistic choice. Just not in the software projects you’re usually involved in.
Yeah, but what they’re saying is they don’t know what the project even is. The page needs to say what bonfire is and what it does.
The first line of the documentation is pretty clear: “Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form communities online.”
Silly me, looking at the About page.
So it’s a library?
I don’t think my computer runs ideologies.
You’re making this comment in a community named after a specific software ideology.
It would still be cool if they wrote what they’re actually delivering…