Hi, I’m Ivan, co-founder of Bonfire Networks.
In the past 3 years we’ve worked full time building an open source framework for developing modular federated digital spaces.
We adopted Elixir through the whole stack, including Liveview (and Surface) for the Frontend, and we’re excited to experiment with LiveViewNative for building native apps.

Think of Bonfire like Wordpress but for federated social networking. You can setup a home for your community (a digital space) and this can be as simple as a basic microblogging platform (such as Mastodon).
From there, digital space’s maintainers can add and tweak plugins to extend its functionalities.
Such plugins aim to extend the agency of a community over the federated network, going beyond the standard microblogging experience.
This includes convivial activities (such as organizing events), political (such as performing decision making tasks), coordination (assigning tasks and collaborate on projects) and so forth.

We believe this is a crucial objective for communities to move beyond polarization and mainstream centralization and give them agency to self-organize in a federated environment, rather than in a walled garden.

In the past years multiple communities reached out, inspired by such vision, to co-design the features they needed for each specific case studies.
Among them, a lot of scientists / professors / researchers, reached out for experimenting with Bonfire looking for a proper alternative to x / mastodon.
Together we built the https://openscience.network case study.

We (the bonfire team) are now in a situation where we have multiple communities and users that are waiting for the software to be ready to adopt it, but we are struggling with the last 10% of the work needed to be done to properly and safely release the awaited bonfire 1.0.

The software is in beta, we’re dealing with some performance issues both on LiveView and Ecto, bugs, plus help on improving and securing the existing codebase.

We’re currently sustaining ourselves through EU grants and donations, and communities are starting to apply to grants to develop ad-hoc bonfire modules for their specific use cases.

I wonder what is the best way to reach out for help and increase the contributions for our FLOSS project.
It’s something new to me. Coming from an activist background I am more used to get in touch and connect with communties / collectives and end-users, rather than developers.
PS We’re not looking for unpaid work, we really care about creating a sustainable environment where developers can coordinate p2p and work together to experiment and benefit existing communities.

I’d love to get your suggestions and help on how to lower the entry barriers, extend the elixir dev interest and knowledge about the project and in the end get more contributions from the dev communtiy.