Mastodon vs. Pleroma

As I now am running both a Mastodon and a Pleroma instance (and this Plume one, but I don’t feel like it really counts), I’m kinda leaning to Pleroma being the better of the two, tbh, and I’ll hereby give you my first impressions and reasoning why I think so:

 ~> #Mastodon’s administration (however more oversightful the Dashboard may be) is lacking in both theming and personalization, which is a basic expectation I normally have from self-hosted services (or at the very least allow you to set your own logo); as also in changing default overall values like post-length and amount of media it can handle per post. Given that most of those cán be changed changing server-files manually, there’s no easy admin interface to it. For what I’ve read it seemed the 4-image-limit is a hard-coded thing, though I did manage to see and download a 5th image from a post via a Mastodon-account by doing one more ‘next image’ action (swipe, click,…) when the 4th is displayed, so I’m sure they could impliment a customizable variable assigned to any bigger maximum than the current one too.

 ~> As for #Pleroma, I really had to look up how to block/ban instances cause I would never have assumed it would be something obscurely named ‘MRF’, nor found out I had to add a vaguely called ‘SimplePolicy’ policy to finally get an extension of the menu allowing me to add instances to block, which technically should have been basic functionality and easier to find. But, however unclear it may be at first, it does end up having the option available without the need of manually editing server-files. Theming-wise, Pleroma not just has the basics, but you can really give your site a fully personal look by only using what is available in the admin-panel.

 => Overall I think Pleroma looks better; has the functionality Mastodon seems to blatantly lack; plays perfectly fine when used with most existing Mastodon apps (at least all the ones I tried anyway) and was surprisingly simple to setup using YunoHost (though I did run into an ‘invalid credentials forever’-bug on my first try, but that was luckily right after installing it and a quick un- and re-install seems to have fixed the problem since).

On a sidenote: I did encounter some rumors talking about a privacy-issue relating to Pleroma, but ngl, I did not yet dive into that rabbithole yet. Might do so one day, but for now I’d say Pleroma is the winner.

<[To Be Continued]>