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?
@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 :)
@ikea_femme @bendingoutward As far as I understand, Pleroma's backend is actually pretty different from Mastodon's. Pleroma is built around ActivityPub (the federation protocol) from the very beginning, so it should be better at handling any future extensions to the protocol. OTOH, Mastodon makes some strong assumptions that what goes on top of ActivityPub is actually microblogging, as opposed to, eg. a video publishing website (like YT). I might be wrong tho.
@Wolf480pl @ikea_femme you might well be on the right track. I'm speaking *really* generally in my previous comparisons.
@bendingoutward @ikea_femme yeah, it's the implementation details that I haven't personally looked at, only heard about. They may make a difference in the long term, but knowing them is probably not very helpful for a person just trying to grasp the relationship between Pleroma and Mastodon.
@ikea_femme another thing is that it's much easier to write an application that performs well if you know the requirements from the start. AFAIK mastodon was gargron's first implementation of activitypub but lain seems to have studied the blade quite a lot beforehand. And taken devlopment a *lot* slower than mastodon. There really isn't one thing that makes one faster than the other - it's just a combination of choosing the right language, the right architecture, and good code.
@ikea_femme continuing the email metaphor: It's like the difference between Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
You can have an account on one and still send messages to the other. This is the federation part.
Both come bundled with their own user interface, but you can also interact using a third party client, like mail.app on iPhone, or Outlook.
As for the backend details, I don't know. Light vs. Heavyweight is more of a design philosophy and can manifest in several ways.
Hope that helps!
@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.