I like what I've heard about Bonfire, and I like the emphasis on community-run servers over a central flagship server (e.g., mastodon.social), but this trend worries me a bit:
“…the movement of starting a new fediverse server was heavily tied to the Mastodon migration effect that started after Elon Musk took over, in the fall of 2022. After that period, much fewer communities have started a new Mastodon server. This poses a challenge for the approach of Bonfire: the Bonfire Social software is now officially released in a 1.0 version, but there is not a single publicly accessible server that runs Bonfire.”
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-142/