Does anyone have a good breakdown of what Mastodon and Pleroma do differently on the backend and why Mastodon is heavier? And why they have a different web interface but use the same messaging protocol for federation? Are they like two different email clients, or more like using jabber to talk to your Google Talk and Yahoo messenger friends?
@ikea_femme continuing the email metaphor: It's like the difference between Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
You can have an account on one and still send messages to the other. This is the federation part.
Both come bundled with their own user interface, but you can also interact using a third party client, like mail.app on iPhone, or Outlook.
As for the backend details, I don't know. Light vs. Heavyweight is more of a design philosophy and can manifest in several ways.
Hope that helps!
