Seems pretty good, you should probably just give it a try and see which one you prefer. https://joinfirefish.org/join/ is also an option (I like it better than Mastodon, but to each their own)
Does Firefish have edit federation yet? Pleroma and Mastodon (and all the currently maintained forks) have it but Misskey and its forks seem to be slacking there.
Another vote for the fork: https://akkoma.social/
Pleroma has had huge drama around the developers and those that are left are not very active and/or not nice people to be around.
I run a Akkoma instance, and while it isn't as lightweight as I hoped it would be, but it is quite manageable and overall nice.
For a small lightweight instance this might be a good option as well: https://gotosocial.org/ but I have not tested it myself yet.
Can you clarify which problems you have with Mastodon that you're hoping to resolve with these alternatives?
Nah. It's hearsay that i didn't look too deep into. But thanks to some replies I've found out that Pleroma also has its own problems. And considering what I'm intending to use such a platform for - following other people and occasionally posting updates of my own - Mastodon serves this purpose well. Plus, it's reasonably popular now, so it's more likely that people have it.
I would go with Akkoma over Pleroma but that's just me. I also like what I see in Calckey (Fire Fish). I like how Fire Fish allows the data migration of follower/following lists and posts. Feature-wise, Mastodon is falling behind a little but I am ultimately satisfied with the platform and I have a lot of time invested in learning it and maintaining it. Rather than learn a new platform, I need to invest my energies in a web development class so that I can make my escape from a miserable career in desktop support.
If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).
If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.
If you don't like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.
I've never heard of it, but my thought when I read it was that it sounds like a bad respiratory tract condition. "The MRI revealed Jack had a 5cm Pleroma in his left lung. Stage 4. It was too late for Jack."
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