Pleroma, the lightweight Elixir-powered microblogging platform, made waves earlier this month by pushing out the 2.0 release of the platform to their project’s “stable” branch.

So, what’s new? The biggest updates to Pleroma involve Emoji Reactions, the removal of OStatus, and a new configuration system for the AdminFE interface. (Note: some bugs appeared in this release, and have since been addressed by a 2.0.1 update. Admins are highly encouraged to upgrade.)

Emoji Reactions

One of the more dynamic changes made with the Pleroma release involves support for Slack-like emoji reactions, meaning that statuses can now receive reactions other than the standard “favorite” icon. Additionally, these reactions are compatible with the ones that MissKey provides, which could be seen as a win for the wider network.

Currently, the version of GlitchFE that ships with Pleroma has yet to support the emoji reactions, and most mobile clients haven’t made a commitment to support such changes.

Goodbye, OStatus

OStatus has been increasingly on its way out from the fediverse ecosystem ever since Mastodon announced that they were phasing out support for it. While other platforms such as Friendica and Hubzilla ostensibly still provide some level of support for the aging protocol standard, at this point Pleroma and Mastodon are going full ActivityPub.

Also noteworthy: GNU Social instances are capable of using an ActivityPub plugin to remain connected to the fediverse.

New AdminFE

Pleroma’s AdminFE has been in development for some time, and has been available in the development branch for many months. That said, this stable release brings in many improvements, and also allows instance admins to update their configurations from a web interface. This forgoes the necessity of making configuration changes from within a file, and for the most part makes instant management much easier.

In addition to these three major changes, the platform has gone through a lot of adjustment and streamlining, and I recommend taking a look at the changelog from the announcements. The Pleroma frontend is faster, the theming system has evolved more, users can now mute entire domains from their timelines, and much more!

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