the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.

What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.

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.”

You’re making this comment in a community named after a specific software ideology.

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.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.

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.

This is a good starting point: https://trent.mirror.xyz/GDDRqetgglGR5IYK1uTXxLalwIH6pBF9nulmY9zarUw

Licenses don’t stop bombs. In general, informational freedoms always benefits the stronger actor, because they already have the means to exploit the information better than other actors. Legal restrictions are just a bump in the road if what you produced is really really valuable for a corporation or a state entity: they can reimplement it, exploiting the design and “trial-and-error” work embedded in whatever you produced, or they can simply ignore licenses because nobody is going to ask the Israeli’s military to respect a license when they are slaughtering civilians.

Social problems never have technical solutions.

If you want to make software that is not captured by state or corporate power, you must create software that is incompatible with whatever they need to do. Embed a social logic that is worthless to their system but useful to our system. Anything else is eventually going to be captured. There’s a lot of literature on anti-capture design, and some of it manages to rise above the purely techno-optimist logic and provide something useful.

It’s a toolkit to build federated apps, with a social media+blogging+collaboration platform built on top of it.

I know it’s a tough ask. In the meanwhile I’m exploring the possibility of embedding excalidraw into something else but I don’t know.

I already contribute to wikis on this topic, like Activist Handbook, but they are not the right format for what I need. Linked documents have limited expressivity and visual people are currently underserved, hence the diagram approach.

Another similar thing would be to use stuff like obsidian canvas which is something in between