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In the past several days, I innaugurated a private Fediverse instance, "Mu", running Pleroma for now. Although Mastodon is the dominant implementation, Pleroma is far easier to install, and uses less memory on small, private instances. By doing this, I'm bucking the trend of people hating to run their own infrastructure. Well, I do run my own e-mail service, so, what the heck, might as well join the Fediverse.
So far, it was pretty fun, but Pleroma has problem spots. For example, Pleroma has a concept of "local accounts" and "remote accounts": local ones are normal, into which users log in at the instance, and remote ones mirror accounts on other instances. This way, if users Alice@Mu and Bob@Mu follow user zaitcev@SLC, Mu creates a "remote" account UnIqUeStRiNg@Mu, which tracks zaitcev@SLC, so Alice and Bob subscribe to it locally. This permits to send zaitcev's updates over the network only once. Makes sense, right? Well... I have a "stuck" remote account now at Mu, let's call it Xprime@Mu and posit that it follows X@SPC. Updates posted by X@SPC are reflected in Xprime@Mu, but if Alice@Mu tries to follow X@SPC, she does not see updates that Xprime@Mu receives (the updates are not reflected in Alice's friends/main timeline) [1]. I asked at #pleroma about it, but all they could suggest was to try and resubscribe. I think I need to unsubscribe and purge Xprime@Mu somehow. Then, when Alice resubscribes, Pleroma will re-create a remote, say Xbis@Mu, and things hopefully ought to work. Well, maybe. I need to examine the source to be sure.
Unfortnately, aside from being somewhat complex by its nature, Pleroma is written in Elixir, which is to Erlang what Kotlin is to Java, I gather. Lain explains it thus:
As I had written a social network in Ruby for my work at around that time, I wanted to apply my [negative] experience to a new project. [...] This was also to get some experience with Elixir and the Erlang ecosystem, which seemed like a great fit for a fediverse server — and I think it is.
and to re-iterate:
When I started writing Pleroma I was already writing a social network in Ruby for my day job. Because of that, I knew a lot about the pain points of doing it with Ruby, mostly the bad performance for anything involving concurrency. I had written a Bittorrent DHT client in Elixir, so I knew that it would work well for this kind of software. I was also happy to work with functional programming again, which I like very much.
Anyway, it's all water under the bridge, and if I want to understand why Xprime@Mu is stuck, I need to learn Elixir. Early signs are not that good. Right away, it uses its own control entity that replaces make(1), packaging, and a few other things, called "mix". Sasuga desu, as they say in my weeb neighbourhood. Every goddamn language does that nowadays.
[1] It's trickier, actually. For an inexplicable reason, Alice sees some updates by X: for example, re-posts.
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