Hosting Bonafide Apps

Today: we host

Right now Bonafide Technologies hosts the infrastructure behind every Bonafide app in production, Pools included. That's one organization, one router, and one registry. If you're building an app today, you build on our infrastructure. See Build a Bonafide App.

That's where we're starting, and it isn't where we want to stay. Bonafide shouldn't be one company's platform any more than it should be one company's app. Hosting should work the way domains and apps already do: open to more than one operator, and interoperating by design.

What ships by end of 2026

Two pieces of protocol work make that possible. Both are already committed in the spec.

Router federation. Routers relay to each other. A connection then delivers correctly even when the two people sit behind independently run infrastructure, instead of one shared router. It's the same store-and-forward relationship that lets two separately run mail servers exchange messages for their users. Neither needs to run the other's infrastructure for delivery to work.

Removing the shared bootstrap key. Today, the first two handshake messages between two people are encrypted with a single key shared across every deployment in the ecosystem. That's fine when there's effectively one member of the ecosystem. It stops being fine once there are several independent hosts, because a key shared by every deployment makes each holder a potential decryption point for every pair's handshake, including pairs it isn't routing for. The router never holds this key, and nothing after the handshake uses it. The fix puts the key material in the connection code itself, so no network-wide shared secret is needed.

Together these are what make more than one host possible at the protocol level. We expect both to be finished by the end of 2026.

What that unlocks, and what comes after

Finishing the protocol work doesn't put a second host into production on its own. Once it's done, other organizations can start standing up their own independently run Bonafide infrastructure, with their own router and their own user database administration, and interoperate with ours and each other's. Two mail providers interoperate without either one running the other's servers, and this works the same way.

Individual self-hosting comes later still. That means a person running their own node, as opposed to an organization running infrastructure for many people. It follows from the router federation work and isn't something the end of 2026 delivers.

Moving an account from one independently run host to another also isn't specified yet. It's a known future direction, listed in the spec's non-goals for v0.1.

The direction is the same either way. People get to choose who hosts the infrastructure behind their Bonafide apps, whether that's us, another hosting organization, or eventually themselves. That choice shouldn't cost them the ability to connect with anyone else on Bonafide, whoever hosts them.

Looking for hosting partners

If you run infrastructure and want to be one of the organizations hosting Bonafide apps once federation ships, we'd like to talk now, while the design is still being finalized. Get in touch →