It’s already someplace, not sure if that is the place you expect them to be but check out my personal instance bonfire.fishinthecalculator.me .

Can someone explain how this can/would work for a Lemmy user?

Very similarly to how you now can interact with Mastodon instances

could this connect to Lemmy somehow, or would that require an integration between bonfire and Lemmy?

It could, maybe it already somewhat can . It shouldn’t require now nor never an explicit integration as they should be able to speak the same language (ActivityPub) . you can try interacting with my personal instance bonfire.fishinthecalculator.me .

How would instances of bonfire decide whether to connect or federate with Lemmy or vice versa?

I don’t know about Lemmy but bonfire can have block list both at the instance and the user level, so the admin can provide defaults but then each user is able to customize them

I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .

The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that’s very intense, let’s say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials

Working Screensharing from first boot lmao

Yes I definitely agree: free software is also a requirement for bootstrappability and reproducibility.

You mean reproducibility and bootstrappability?