mathias

Wait, what? I tried to follow a couple of Lemmy groups from my Akkoma (fork of Pleroma) account. It shows as ”requested follow” in Akkoma. A day later I still haven’t actually followed the groups in question. You say there is a switch somewhere I can flick? In Lemmy, or in my other service(s)?

Yeah, but even though that is cool I'm not sure how well that will scale when Lemmy picks up lots of users.

From a Lemmy users perspective: You have a cool link that you wish others get to see. To post it you need to pick a group where it fits in. It might not be the groups you normally hang in. Or it is, and the group might have 100's (in the future maybe 1000's) of contributors and the group stream is moving rather fast.

From another Fediverse service: That Lemmy group you started following is flooding your home stream as it is really active. Sadly you also published a Lemmy post in a group you don't normally hang in, but you now have to follow to be able to boost your own post in it to the further Fediverse.

I can imagine how that quickly creates both noise and scalability issues.

Indeed. I just now came back here to Lemmy to see if that had changed, seeing as I could find my Lemmy user (this account) from my Akkoma instance, and I could press "follow" over on Akkoma. That apparently sends back to Akkoma that my Akkoma user has "requested" to follow my Lemmy user, but I can see no trace of that over here at Lemmy, and here is no way to "approve" followers.

It would be great if I could follow my Lemmy user from my other Fediverse accounts and then re-post (boost) my entries from Lemmy to the further Fediverse without having to make a separate post about it. Much like Pixelfed works.

I haven't actually had to touch the code of it at all, so can't answer for how the development community is. I have heard "Pleroma is like Mastodon Lite", and indeed if I look at server resources that seems to be correct. That is however also the only place where I find Pleroma lighter than Mastodon. IMHO Pleroma has an added feature set compared to Mastodon that make it more competent than Mastodon out of the box, and even more so if you have admin rights.

I really like the old-school front-end (Pleroma-fe) too, but if that is not to everyones liking there is also Soapbox front-end (slick one content column "theme") and, of course, there is also a front-end (included in the default Pleroma install) called Masto-fe, which literally is the Mastodon frontend (though a fork from Glitch I believe).

The one thing the default front-end doesn't do that Mastodon does is "lists", i.e. being able to group your contacts into lists. That functionality is actually in Pleroma though, and accessible from masto-fe as well as from Soapbox, so for some reason they have chosen not to show it on the default pleroma-fe.

The pleroma-fe you need to "fetch new posts" manually though, which can be irritating at times and a blessing at other times. If I wish for the feed to "flow" I switch over to masto-fe and it updates itself. Swapping between pleroma-fe and masto-fe is as easy as clicking a link in either.

Apart from Pleroma having a larger default post character count compared to a default install of Mastodon, it also has built-in chat (which is on top of "direct message" and other privacy groupings).

Also, for those that like to "skin" or "theme" their things (I do) it has quite comprehensive settings for doing exactly that when it comes to the default pleroma-fe. As Pleroma has great interconnectivity with Mastodon, Friendica (who is the king of the connectivity hill) and Pixelfed etc I have been really quite pleased with Pleroma.

Having said all of that, Friendica is currently my "main" service. As the Fediverse services are "algorithm" free (i.e. chronological) one can easily miss good content, due to not watching the screen as it flows past. In Friendica you can group and filter with great flexibility, which can slow down the "news feed" quite a bit, to make it readable. Also, as Friendica properly supports threading you can select to bump messages to the top based on activity in a thread (it will also highlight which message is new, as it, just like Lemmy, is possible to give a reply in the "middle" of the flow (just like this reply). In Friendica one doesn't miss in what context a given post is made, because it is all there. In Mastodon/Pleroma it can take quite some work to back-pedal a long thread.

I "came back" to the Fediverse not too long ago (fed up with Big Tech services) and started exploring the various ActivityPub services. I already had accounts on Mastodon and Diaspora. When looking in to self-hosting (as that would be the "ultimate federation") I learnt that Mastodon required a server (in my case virtual) that I didn't have the budget for. It simply wouldn't compile on the small Digital Ocean instances and it ran like crap on the next one up too.

That made me look around for other alternatives. Today I have one instance of Pleroma running, which was dead easy to install as long as anyone has access to a sudo commandline. Literally copy/paste between windows and it was done.

I also have an instance of Friendica running. It was slightly more involved to install as I have a baseline of wanting to use HTTPS, Nginx etc (which wasn't part of the standard instructions, though there is info out there to find), but it also went well. Both instances have been running for a couple of weeks, admittedly with only me as the sole user of either, but I follow a couple of hundred people on each service.

I have since learnt about Misskey, which I have been test driving on a public server and been quite impressed by how slick it feels. I shall see if I can bother setting up a server for that too, hehe.

Pixelfed I am using on a public instance so haven't tried installing that. Have (just during last week) contemplated on if I should run various little services like Lemmy, Searx etc on one of my servers already up, as they don't seem stressed out at all today. Haven't investigated how resource hungry Lemmy or Searx are though.