Bonfire

About

A modern alternative to the Discord client. Use Discord without ever having to touch the mobile Discord client.

NOTE: Bonfire is in it's very early stages of development. It is absolutely NOT ready for regular usage.

Platform Targets

🟩 Android
🟩 iOS
🟨 Windows
🟨 MacOS
🟨 Linux
🟨 Web

Because we are using flutter instead of react native, it's possible to cross-compile to platforms other than mobile! The build currently runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, but Web is currently unavailable due to parts of our API framework not fully supporting it (which will change).

General Goals / Ethic

To start, lemmie outline a few things.

This is not a seperate platform. You login with Discord, you are using all of Discord's features, but through the interface we've made instead of through Discord's.
This is against TOS. Don't do use this unless you have some risk tolerance. I have never gotten banned in the development of Bonfire, but that isn't to say it can't happen.
Our goal here isn't to undermine Discord's monetization- we understand that Discord is a company with bills to pay and employees to feed. Our goal is to create a client that just doesn't suck. It's easy to take a platform like Discord for granted. Yes it has it's problems (I know that more than anyone), but they really have created a cool product, and it's something I'd like to improve as a user.
Are you a mobile client? Desktop client? Sort of both. Bonfire is a mobile-first client. All of the features we are adding right now are 100% intended for mobile, but because we are using Flutter it's possible to build Bonfire on other platforms. In fact, it currently works just about the same on Windows / MacOS / Linux as it does on mobile (it just needs to be re-themed and re-formatted to look nice). Web is on the radar, but will not work at the current moment.
Perhaps, extensions? Well yes (in the future). The goal is that Bonfire can be modified to your liking, much like using Vencord and such. It would work very different from a developer standpoint, but having a built-in plugin marketplace would definitely be cool, although yes, quite difficult. It won't be a focus until the client is at a point I'd consider release-ready.

Why not the BetterDiscord / Vencord Approach?

Mobile is just a different beast due to the difficult nature of modifying packed binaries. While the Desktop client can be fixed relatively easily because it's possible to inject javascript directly into the application, mobile would require modifying the binary ahead of time to patch in your changes. This is extremely difficult due to the locked-down nature of apps (if you'd like to see an example of this approach, check out ReVanced). Instead of trying to hack together patches for an already broken and slow client, we have decided to tackle creating a full re-implementation of the Discord client using the flutter framework!

Usage Samples - Note: The app changes fast! These experiences may have improved / changed recently.

Developing

General Info

I'm pretty new to managing public projects, so you'll have to bear with me here. For starters, there's a few projects that OpenBonfire uses and maintains, which can be found in our org. Let's just talk about the big ones.

firebridge: A fork of nyxx (a bot API for Dart) that allows the usage of user tokens. This is very unfinished, and needs a load of work to be done.
fireview: A cross-platform webview API that combines multiple webview frameworks. Again, this is not very great and needs a lot of work. This one is a much easier implementation though, I just haven't had the time.

Progress not exhaustive, there's a lot of stuff to do

🟨 Login
- 🟩 Authenticator Login
- 🟥 SMS Login
- 🟥 No MFA Login (captcha appears when there's no authenticator)
🟨 Messaging
- 🟩 Sending Messages
- 🟩 Cache Messages
- 🟨 Message View
- 🟨 Context Actions (edit, delete, etc)
- 🟨 Event Actions (edit, delete, etc)
- 🟨 Embeds
  - 🟩 Youtube embeds
  - 🟩 Tenor videos
  - 🟩 Attachments
    - 🟩 Image Attachments
    - 🟩 Video Attachments
    - 🟩 Audio Attachments (with actual mobile playback)
- 🟥 Offline Message Scheduling
- 🟥 Unreads
- 🟥 Threads
- 🟨 Member List
  - 🟩 Base View
  - 🟩 Networking (handled in firebridge, tricky due to Discord's sharding)
  - 🟥 Member Search
🟨 Friends
🟨 Guilds
- 🟩 Guild List
- 🟩 Guild Networking
- 🟥 Guild Organization
  - 🟥 Guild Order
  - 🟥 Guild Names
  - 🟥 Guild Folders
🟥 Voice Chat
🟥 Camera Chat
🟥 Screen Sharing

Building

Clone Bonfire
Run flutter pub run
Run dart run build_runner watch in a seperate terminal
You are on your way!

Don't forget to run dart run build_runner watch before developing! This is required when using freezed and riverpod.

A quick note for contributors.

We are looking for contributors! I would absolutely love to get this project completed, but it's pretty difficult time-wise. The pacing when I have time to work on it goes pretty fast though, so more people pitching in would be fantastic!

Some of my code might not be great. This is the largest Flutter app I've made by far, so you'll have to bear with me here. Some of the code (looking at you repositories/messages.dart) may not be the best. I am absolutely not opposed to full restructuring if it's reasonable, just bring it up with me first.

OpenBonfire/bonfire