Pleroma (software)

Last updated
Pleroma
Developer(s) lain, et. al
Initial release0.9.9 / February 22, 2019;5 years ago (2019-02-22) [1]
Stable release
2.7.0 / August 1, 2024;3 months ago (2024-08-01)
Repository
Written in Elixir, JavaScript
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Microblogging
License AGPLv3
Website pleroma.social

Pleroma is a free and open-source microblogging social networking service. Unlike popular microblogging services such as Twitter or Weibo, Pleroma can be self-hosted and operated by anyone with a server and a web domain, a combination commonly referred to as an instance. Instance administrators can manage their own code of conduct, terms of service, and content moderation policies, allowing users to have more control over the content they view as well as their experience. [2] [ full citation needed ] It was named after the religious concept of pleroma, or the totality of divine powers. [3]

Contents

The software also implements the ActivityPub protocol, which allows users to communicate and interact with content from other Pleroma instances or any server that is running software that supports ActivityPub (such as Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc.), a decentralized network commonly referred to as the Fediverse. [4]

As of July 2024, over 138k user accounts (1.3% of the total amount of fediverse users) have been found on over a thousand Pleroma instances. [5]

History

Pleroma-tan, Pleroma's mascot Pleroma-tan.png
Pleroma-tan, Pleroma's mascot

In 2016, the Pleroma project was created by a German developer under the pseudonym "lain". [6] It was originally designed as an alternative user interface for GNU social with many similarities to Qvitter, a popular frontend at the time which resembled an early Twitter user interface. The frontend was written with the Vue.js JavaScript framework.

As development of the frontend continued, it was perceived that there were many disadvantages to GNU social's design of using plugins to implement features, as well as issues with its codebase and usage of PHP, which led to the development of a backend to replace GNU social. [7] [8] The first commit to the repository hosting the Pleroma backend was made on March 17, 2017. [9]

Releases

On February 22, 2019, the first stable release of the Pleroma backend, 0.9.9, was released. [10] The backend includes the Pleroma frontend as the main user interface, federation of user content using OStatus and ActivityPub and support for the GNU social and Mastodon client APIs. The backend was built using the Elixir programming language and the Phoenix web framework, and uses PostgreSQL for its database. [11]

On June 28, 2019, Pleroma 1.0 was released. This release adds the ability to create polls, report content and schedule posts to be posted at a later date. A new website containing documentation for users and administrators was also launched. [12] [13]

On March 8, 2020, Pleroma 2.0 was released. This release drops support for the OStatus protocol due to a lack of usage and active maintenance, introduces a new user interface for administration and adds post reactions using Unicode emoji. [14] [15]

On August 28, 2020, Pleroma 2.1 was released. This release includes a federated instant messaging system based on ActivityPub, an alternative to the direct messages system used by other software such as Mastodon. [16]

On October 29, 2023, Pleroma 2.6 was released. This release implements quoting posts as well as the ability to use custom emoji for post reactions. [17]

Pleroma was originally developed with its frontend and backend releasing new versions in sync, but starting with Pleroma 2.6.1 the policy was discontinued. [18]

On August 1, 2024, Pleroma 2.7 was released, adding support for uploading files via IPFS, bookmark categorization, improved theming and various quality-of-life improvements. [19]

Forks

Akkoma

Akkoma is a fork of Pleroma that started development in 2022. The fork was made to support a faster pace of development, as well as to support more user customization. [20] [21]

Features

Pleroma has been described as being more lightweight than alternatives like Mastodon, due to being less intensive on system resources and requiring fewer software dependencies. [22]

Pleroma's default post length limit is 5000 characters, and can be configured by instance administrators. [11] [23] It is capable of uploading and sharing multimedia, as well as polls. [24] Posts are created by default using plaintext, but can also be translated from a variety of markup languages such as HTML, BBCode and Markdown.

While Pleroma comes with its own frontend by default, instance administrators can install additional user interfaces, such as a port of Mastodon's advanced mode (similar to TweetDeck) as well as a interface for the Gopher protocol. [25]

Pleroma includes a system known as the Message Rewrite Facility (or MRF), which allows administrators of a Pleroma instance to modify the content that it sends and receives. By default, Pleroma provides a selection of policies, including a basic moderation policy that can create restrictions on federation with other instances. Custom MRF policies can be written using any language based on the BEAM virtual machine. [26] This system has been used as a method to study how content moderation works in the Fediverse and the challenges that it faces, since the list of active policies is publicly shown by default through both the API and the frontend. [27]

Adoption

The Debian community hosts their own microblogging service using Pleroma, as part of a project to establish a suite of social networking services for maintainers. [28] [29]

Pleroma has received funding through the NLNet Foundation to aid development. [30]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scanner Access Now Easy</span> Open source scanner application programming interface

Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) is an open-source application programming interface (API) that provides standardized access to any raster image scanner hardware. The SANE API is public domain. It is commonly used on Linux.

Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as X (Twitter), Threads, Tumblr, Mastodon and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Affero General Public License</span> Free software license based on the AGPLv1 and GPLv3

The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU GPL version 3 and the Affero General Public License (non-GNU).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU social</span> Microblogging social networking service

GNU social is a free and open-source microblogging social networking service that implements the OStatus and ActivityPub standards for interoperability between installations. While offering similar functionality to social networks such as Twitter, GNU social seeks to provide the ability for open and federated communication between different microblogging communities, known as 'instances'. Both enterprises and individuals can install and control their own instances and user data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smuxi</span> IRC client

Smuxi is a cross-platform IRC client for the GNOME desktop inspired by Irssi. It pioneered the concept of separating the frontend client from the backend engine which manages connections to IRC servers inside a single graphical application.

OStatus is an open standard for decentralized social networking, allowing users on one service to send and receive status updates with users from another. The standard describes how a suite of various standards, including Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger, can be used together, which enables different microblogging server implementations to communicate status updates between their users back-and-forth, in near real-time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friendica</span> Free software for distributed social networks

Friendica is a free and open-source software distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers.

Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.

mpv (media player) Free and open-source media player software

mpv is free and open-source media player software based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg. It runs on several operating systems, including Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows, along with having an Android port called mpv-android. It is cross-platform, running on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390x, x86/IA-32, x86-64, and some other by 3rd party.

pump.io Decentralized social network and protocol

pump.io is a software package containing a social networking service and communication protocol that can be used as a federated social network. Started by Evan Prodromou, it is a follow-up to his previous microblogging software StatusNet and its OStatus protocol. It is designed to be more lightweight and usable for general activity streams instead of the predecessor's focus on microblogging timelines, with its goal being to achieve "most of what people want from a social network".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PeerTube</span> Decentralised video hosting network

PeerTube is a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform powered by WebTorrent, that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce load on individual servers when viewing videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mastodon (social network)</span> Self-hosted social network software

Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fediverse</span> Network of federated social media platforms

The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Micro.blog is a microblogging and social networking service created by Manton Reece. It is the first large multi-user social media service to support the Webmention and Micropub standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, and is part of the Fediverse, supporting ActivityPub.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ActivityPub</span> Decentralized social networking protocol

ActivityPub is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking. It provides a client-to-server API for creating and modifying content, as well as a federated server-to-server (S2S) protocol for delivering notifications and content to other servers. ActivityPub has become the main standard used in the fediverse, a popular network used for social networking that consists of software such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube.

Libervia is a multifunctional communications application and decentralized social network published under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pixelfed</span> Open source photo-sharing platform

Pixelfed is a free and open-source image sharing social network service. The platform uses a decentralized architecture which is roughly comparable to e-mail providers, meaning user data is not stored on one central server. It uses the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users to interact with other social networks within the protocol, such as Mastodon, PeerTube, and Friendica. Pixelfed and other platforms utilizing this protocol are considered to be part of the Fediverse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugen Rochko</span> German software developer and creator of Mastodon

Eugen Rochko is a Russian-born German software developer, best known as the creator of Mastodon, a decentralized open-source social networking platform consisting of a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and moderation policies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lemmy (social network)</span> Open source social media software

Lemmy is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social news aggregation and discussion forums. These hosts, known as "instances", communicate with each other using the ActivityPub protocol.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Misskey</span> Federated social networking service

Misskey is a free and open-source social networking service. Created in 2014 by Japanese software engineer Eiji "syuilo" Shinoda, Misskey was originally developed as bulletin board software. A microblogging feature similar to Twitter was added to the platform, which eventually became the main format of the service. The name Misskey comes from the lyrics of Brain Diver, a song by the Japanese band May'n.

References

  1. ↑ Soykaf, Lain (22 Feb 2019). "Pleroma's First Release! 0.9.9" . Retrieved 2024-08-25.
  2. ↑ "ElixirConf® US 2019". elixirconf.com. Retrieved 2024-07-14.
  3. ↑ "lain.com". August 2024. Archived from the original on 2024-08-25.
  4. ↑ "Microblogging with ActivityPub [LWN.net]". lwn.net. Retrieved 2024-07-14.
  5. ↑ "FediDB, Fediverse Network Statistics". fedidb.org. Retrieved 2024-07-10.
  6. ↑ Tilley, Sean (2018-04-25). "Blushy-Crushy Fediverse Idol: A Chat with Lain about Pleroma". We Distribute. Retrieved 2024-07-10.
  7. ↑ "Files · 191c02af1ebfc7e6c53dc88d97c4e3ca23fbea8b · Pleroma / pleroma-fe". GitLab. 2016-10-26. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  8. ↑ Tilley, Sean (2017-09-24). "A quick guide to The Free Network". Medium. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  9. ↑ "Files · a93f3421a704d6728a856d5d82cdbf9c43f3f897 · Pleroma / pleroma · GitLab". GitLab. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  10. ↑ "Pleroma's First Release! 0.9.9". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  11. 1 2 "What Is Pleroma?". blog.soykaf.com. 2018-03-07. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  12. ↑ "Pleroma 1.0.0". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  13. ↑ Tilley, Sean (2019-06-28). "Pleroma Releases 1.0!". We Distribute. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  14. ↑ Tilley, Sean (2020-03-23). "Hooray! Pleroma Officially Releases 2.x Series". We Distribute. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  15. ↑ "Releasing Pleroma 2.0.0". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  16. ↑ "Releasing Pleroma 2.1.0". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  17. ↑ "Pleroma major release: 2.6.0". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  18. ↑ "Separating Frontend and Backend versions". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  19. ↑ "Pleroma Major Release: 2.7.0". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-08-01.
  20. ↑ "Akkoma: A vision to refocus Pleroma". Coffee and Dreams. 2022-06-24. Retrieved 2024-07-06.
  21. ↑ "Fediverse-Serie: Pleroma & Akkoma: Einfache Kommunikation im Fediverse". GNU/Linux.ch (in German). 2023. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  22. ↑ "Pleroma". LinuxReviews. Retrieved 2024-07-10.
  23. ↑ "Pleroma User's Guide". edith.reisen. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  24. ↑ "Pleroma 1.0.0". blog.soykaf.com. 2019-06-28. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  25. ↑ "Gopher Support in Pleroma". pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-12.
  26. ↑ "Message Rewrite Facility - Pleroma Documentation". docs-develop.pleroma.social. Retrieved 2024-07-07.
  27. ↑ Hassan, Anaobi Ishaku; Raman, Aravindh; Castro, Ignacio; Zia, Haris Bin; De Cristofaro, Emiliano; Sastry, Nishanth; Tyson, Gareth (2021-12-03). "Exploring content moderation in the decentralised web: The pleroma case". Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies. CoNEXT '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 328–335. doi:10.1145/3485983.3494838. ISBN   978-1-4503-9098-9.
  28. ↑ "Debian Looks To Go More Social From Microblogging To A Federated Image+Video Platform - Phoronix". www.phoronix.com. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
  29. ↑ "Announcing Debian Social". lists.debian.org. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
  30. ↑ "NLnet; Pleroma". nlnet.nl. Retrieved 2024-07-10.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.