Half a year after Pleroma 2.0, today from Pleroma announced version 2.1.0. Doesn’t sound like that much more, but it’s full of new features and fixes.
What is Pleroma?
Pleroma is a federated social networking platform, compatible with Mastodon and other ActivityPub implementations. It is free software licensed under the AGPLv3. Pleroma actually consists of two components: a backend, named simply Pleroma, and a user-facing frontend, named Pleroma-FE. It also includes the Mastodon frontend, if that’s your thing.
What is news in Pleroma 2.1.0
The most prominent feature in 2.1 are the all-new Chats. You can instantly message your friends (and enemies) in a one-to-one chat directly inside Pleroma now – no more “DM for discord”.
This feature is completely different from the existing direct messaging system, which proved to be cumbersome and easy to get wrong. If you want to get the whole story, you can check out this Merge Request, but the main point is that these Chats will feel and behave like the chats you are used to from other instant messaging systems like XMPP, Matrix or WhatsApp.
For now, Pleroma do not have group chats (which will require group support) or end-to-end encryption, but these are on the horizon.
Version 2.1 brings more configuration options for admins, like fine-grained restrictions of timelines for registered users and guests, a ‘by approval’ registrations mode and an easy way to install and manage different frontends.
Also added a by-default MRF policy that will prevent very old posts from showing up in your timeline when they freshly arrive.
Under the hood, developers rewrote most of the code relating to activity ingestion. They also rewrote HTML parsing library once again, to make it even better.
The frontend changed a bit. The navigation panel on the left side became quite crowded, so it slimmed it down a bit. There’s now only one ‘Timeline’ link. You can select the different kinds of timelines in a dropdown menu on the timeline itself now.
As always, if you want to see the full picture, check out the changelog.
