The practical middle is a cooperative. Lemmer-Webber is on social.coop, one of several instances where members contribute money and take part in decisions, and that money pays for technical maintenance that would otherwise require volunteers. Bonfire is a member of Co-op Cloud – a community first and a set of deployment tools and recipes second. Its other members include hosting cooperatives such as CoQuest, which hosts jacobin.social and helps maintain the recipe that enables straightforward Bonfire deployment. A community that needs managed hosting gets infrastructure people and software developers in the same conversation when something breaks. Bonfire’s phrasing is “do it together” rather than “do it yourself.”

Lemmer-Webber’s answer to what remains unsolved starts with an admission. “ActivityPub was not supposed to be as instance-centric as it is.” She originally envisioned a distributed social network where identity was decoupled from domain name, so moving between instances would be ordinary. But the ecosystem adopted ActivityPub in a client-server shape and then settled into it.

What does exist today is account migration. De Borniol names it first when asked what organizations must have before opening a community space: Members need to be able to export their data, move their account, and bring their follower networks with them. This keeps communities protected during shutdowns and sets the stage for portable identity and content.