Hi, HJ here. After spring’s disaster and previous years of mismanagement and never-ending drama some folks in pleroma-dev have been pretty demotivated and burned out. Having pleroma as a side “weekend warrior” kind of deal doesn’t help it either, as most of us have jobs/schools and other stuff to do and people would rather spend weekend relaxing. not to mention, I personally would really love working on Pleroma fulltime, but alas it doesn’t pay bills. After seeing a whole bunch of fediverse projects on NLnet I thought “why the heck not” and with the rest of dev community’s blessing, send the application. Several months and bunch of paperwork later we got approved.

And here it is: https://nlnet.nl/project/Pleroma/

Since we have somewhat a history of being not-entirely-transparent about being financed by someone let’s rectify this right now, in a bit of a QnA format.

Q: Is this another (hostile) takeover?
A: No. At least I hope it doesn’t come as such. I just want people to be able to spend more time working on project. I don’t intend on telling people what to do and project direction is really up to community’s decision.

Q: How much?
A: Around 30k€ for a year.

Recent events surrounding social media have made many people think about leaving the currently dominant platforms. If you are looking for alternatives, you’ll inevitably come across the term ‘Fediverse’. But what is the Fediverse and why should you use it?

In this first in a series of FAQs, I’ll try to answer questions that a total beginner might have. In later installments, I’ll answer more questions about the technical details and about Pleroma specifics.

I hope this will help you along on your way to the Fediverse!

Half a year after Pleroma 2.0, today we are releasing our next big version, Pleroma 2.1. Doesn’t sound like that much more, but it’s full of new features and fixes! Keep reading on to find out what we baked for you.

Long-awaited and finally ready, just in time for FOSDEM International Women’s Day, Pleroma 2.0.0 is here! There have been a lot of changes, including breaking ones, so let me give you a quick tour of this release.

Note: this has originally been posted at https://blog.soykaf.com/post/pleroma-1.0/

After long months of doing only bugfix and security releases, we are finally releasing the long-awaited 1.0 release. No more nines!

Pretty much one year ago, we started fighting the typical Web 4.0 Javascript bloat by adding Gopher support. After a wildly successful 0.999 release, we heard your calls for more debloating. The biggest complaint with the gopher support was the inability to post. So today, we’re taking it a step further: Making Pleroma a BBS.

The first commit in Pleroma happened 2016, on October 26th. Now it’s a few years and months later, and we are doing our first stable release!

Are you still running develop? That’s so 2018.

Note: this has originally been posted at https://blog.soykaf.com/post/gopher-support-in-pleroma/

As you may already know, Pleroma is high-performance and low-resource fediverse server mean to run even on small devices like a Raspberry Pi.

Still, there is one part of Pleroma that is wasteful to the extreme…

It’s true! Pleroma’s mother allowed it to have TWO frontends, but both are resource-hogging Javascript monstrosities. If you don’t have a ‘modern’ browser that turns your PC into a heater, you won’t be able to see any posts!

So where did we go wrong? I think the problem goes way back. We made a deal with the Devil when we accepted free-form HTML into our systems. The best solution is to not make this mistake anymore, and go back to the future to a better alternative.

And that’s why, today, I’m announcing Gopher support for Pleroma!