Fork of the Pleroma fediverse server after years of mounting tensions between 'free speech' and free software factions within the project.
Akkoma is an ActivityPub server written in Elixir, forked from Pleroma. It supports emoji reactions, rich text formatting, Mastodon-compatible API, local-only posting, and improved multi-user instance management. It federates with all ActivityPub implementations.
Pleroma was a lightweight ActivityPub server that positioned itself as an alternative to the heavier Mastodon. But beneath its technical simplicity lay a deeply uncomfortable political tension. The project was an uneasy alliance between two groups: 'free speech' advocates who wanted minimal content moderation, and free software advocates who simply wanted a better fediverse server. As the project's creator aligned increasingly with the former group, tensions mounted.
In January 2022, the tensions exploded into a full schism among the small group of Pleroma developers. Before Akkoma, there was an earlier fork attempt called 'Newroma' — but it failed spectacularly. Newroma never established any governance structure, nobody took responsibility, and being led by a committee gave it absolutely no vision or direction. Most developers drifted back to Pleroma after a band-aid fix from the project creator.
Learning from Newroma's failure, Akkoma launched in mid-2022 with a clear identity and a single maintainer with a strong vision. The project's blog post, 'A vision to refocus Pleroma,' laid out the thesis: Pleroma had no identity and was trying to be everything to everyone. Akkoma would embrace what Pleroma actually was — not a lightweight server, but a feature-rich one — and carve out a niche not covered by Mastodon or Misskey.
Akkoma aligned itself more closely with the Misskey ecosystem, implementing features like emoji reactions, rich content types, and better multi-instance community features. The project explicitly rejected Pleroma's assumption that instances should be small or single-user, instead treating each instance as a community in its own right.
The fork demonstrated a pattern common in fediverse projects: political and cultural disagreements within small development teams can be more destructive than technical ones, especially when a project's identity is unclear.
Major schism among Pleroma developers over governance and project direction
Newroma fork attempt fails due to lack of leadership and vision
Akkoma launches with 'A vision to refocus Pleroma' blog post
Akkoma establishes itself as the primary actively-maintained Pleroma derivative
Akkoma carved out a meaningful niche in the fediverse as a feature-rich server that bridges the gap between Mastodon's conservatism and Misskey's experimentalism. It also provided a cautionary tale about failed forks (Newroma) versus successful ones — the difference being clear vision and decisive leadership rather than committee governance.