Does anyone have a good breakdown of what Mastodon and Pleroma do differently on the backend and why Mastodon is heavier? And why they have a different web interface but use the same messaging protocol for federation? Are they like two different email clients, or more like using jabber to talk to your Google Talk and Yahoo messenger friends?
@ikea_femme your analogies are pretty close. it's somewhat like the difference between Gmail and Yahoo Mail. they speak the same protocol, but are essentially different applications written in different languages on different architecture.
by and large, the biggest difference, particularly in terms of your first question, is the implementation language. something like Mastodon is a use case that elixir (and Phoenix) is *incredibly* good at.
@bendingoutward So are the backends pretty similar, but the functional erlangy paradigm makes pleroma more efficient? I guess what I'm curious about is why pleroma has a different interface rather than keeping Mastodon's frontend, which would make the "like Mastodon, but runs on a raspberry pi" angle extra cool. Although I guess the spirit of gnu social is to make it easy to try new things but maintain compatibility.
@ikea_femme Pretty much, on all accounts. Haven't used or seen pleroma's UI, but do keep in mind that there's at least one mastodon (or maybe it was a specific GNU Social) instance out there that tries very, very hard to mimic the birdsite UI.
Pretty sure it's a "takes all types" sort of situation :)
