Looking for alternatives to Twitter microblogging. Mastodon seemed cool but has its downsides. Pleroma purports to be lighter-weight to host and fully ActivityPub compatible. What’s the catch?
(I am not very experienced with the fediverse, having only just joined Lemmy)
Seems pretty good, you should probably just give it a try and see which one you prefer. https://joinfirefish.org/join/ is also an option (I like it better than Mastodon, but to each their own)
Can you clarify which problems you have with Mastodon that you’re hoping to resolve with these alternatives?
Nah. It’s hearsay that i didn’t look too deep into. But thanks to some replies I’ve found out that Pleroma also has its own problems. And considering what I’m intending to use such a platform for - following other people and occasionally posting updates of my own - Mastodon serves this purpose well. Plus, it’s reasonably popular now, so it’s more likely that people have it.
I’ve never heard of it, but my thought when I read it was that it sounds like a bad respiratory tract condition. “The MRI revealed Jack had a 5cm Pleroma in his left lung. Stage 4. It was too late for Jack.”
If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).
If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.
If you don’t like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.
