@exis7enz @PunishedD Mastodon is modelled after twitter, and it shows. Twitter was never good, it was a dumb idea from the outset and it's still a dumb idea now.
Pleroma was basically "hey fedi is pretty cool but why the fuck would you copy twitter in anything?"
*That said*, these days I actually find it hard to recommend pleroma, either, primarly because it depends on postgres, which is such a piece of shit that arch just keeps two copies of it in repos at all times to deal with it.
Without actually having used them, I'm more inclined to recommend snac2 (php though) or epicyon (python though), but there is also always misskey and its 50 million forks (none of which I recommend, because forks die, that's what they do). Misskey is good if it is important to you to have a setting on user accounts to add cat ears to their avatar.
Notably pleroma mimics mastodon's client-server API so it just picks up mastodon clients for free, but a lot of those tend to just assume things rather than actually check what the server reports, so you tend to get limited experience even on pleroma instances. However, many clients also support misskey API, and that tends to check server settings. Occasionally they copy that behaviour to masto side.