Why we launched Jacobin.social
Jacobin doesn't run on ad revenue, foundation money, or a billionaire owner – we answer to our readers, no one else. That independence is exactly why we needed to build our own community space instead of renting one from Big Tech.
It started with a question we put to our readers directly: what did they actually want from us? Among the features they told us mattered most were the ability to discuss with other readers in a protected setting, to bring their own story ideas to the editorial team, and to get a look behind the scenes of how Jacobin works. Many didn't just want to read Jacobin – they already saw themselves as part of a Jacobin community, and wanted a space that reflected that.
So in November 2025, we launched a crowdfunding campaign to build exactly that – a digital space we control. Readers backed it with more than 60.000 € proof that this was something they were willing to actually pay for, not just ask for.
With the rise of the far right across Europe, and in Germany especially, breaking the media dominance of the right matters more than ever. Jacobin.social is part of how we try to do that: a space that offers what tech oligarchs and their algorithmically distorted timelines can't – community and purpose instead of isolation and apathy.
But building that space meant deciding what it would run on – and that decision mattered as much as the decision to build it at all. We'd already seen enough cases of a US president putting an organisation or individual on a sanctions list, only for American tech companies to comply by cutting off their accounts – a reminder that infrastructure run by US tech companies can be switched off the moment it becomes politically inconvenient, for organisations in Germany just as much as anywhere else. So we looked for infrastructure built on the same principle we run Jacobin on: answering to the community, not to shareholders.
Our own open social web with Bonfire
That's why we built Jacobin.social on Bonfire. Bonfire is a mission-driven, AGPL-licensed project building sustainable open-source tools for communities – no VC, no ads, no incentive to enshittify the space over time. Every instance federates over ActivityPub, so in the long run our community can connect with countless federated apps across the web while staying on infrastructure we control.
It runs alongside Ghost, the publishing infrastructure behind jacobin.de. Together, Ghost and Bonfire let us keep publishing the way we always have, while giving our readers a space that's genuinely theirs – to network with like-minded people, hear directly from organisers and activists, or bring their own story ideas straight to our editorial team.
We're starting small and deliberate: Jacobin.social launches as a closed beta, open first to a core group of subscribers who'll test and shape the space with us before we open the doors wider.
Check out more on bonfirenetworks.org/casestudy/jacobin