Pleroma is a microblogging server software that can federate (= exchange messages with) other servers that support ActivityPub. What that means is that you can host a server for yourself or your friends and stay in control of your online identity, but still exchange messages with people on larger servers. Pleroma will federate with all servers that implement ActivityPub, like Friendica, GNU Social, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Misskey, Peertube, and Pixelfed.
Pleroma is written in Elixir and uses PostgresSQL for data storage. It's efficient enough to be ran on low-power devices like Raspberry Pi (though we wouldn't recommend storing the database on the internal SD card ;) but can scale well when ran on more powerful hardware (albeit only single-node for now).
For clients it supports the [Mastodon client API](https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/guidelines/) with Pleroma extensions (see the API section on <https://docs-develop.pleroma.social>).
If you are running Linux (glibc or musl) on x86/arm, the recommended way to install Pleroma is by using OTP releases. OTP releases are as close as you can get to binary releases with Erlang/Elixir. The release is self-contained, and provides everything needed to boot it. The installation instructions are available [here](https://docs-develop.pleroma.social/backend/installation/otp_en/).
Currently Pleroma is not packaged by any OS/Distros, but if you want to package it for one, we can guide you through the process on our [community channels](#community-channels). If you want to change default options in your Pleroma package, please **discuss it with us first**.
While we don’t provide docker files, other people have written very good ones. Take a look at <https://github.com/angristan/docker-pleroma> or <https://glitch.sh/sn0w/pleroma-docker>.
