What is Pleroma?

And what the bleep do we know?

Pleroma is a distributed, object-oriented operating system/VM inspired by the original vision of Alan Kay's Smalltalk, the E programming language, and Inferno/Plan9.

The creator or creators of Pleroma are entirely unknown - it is a found operating system. The specification was discovered in a cache located in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt dating back to the 3rd century.

Pleroma is the answer to the following questions/problems:

  • What happened to Smalltalk?
  • I want to host reliable internet services from multiple computers (some on my personal network, some on the cloud, some mobile), but Kuberenetes is too complex
  • Distributed software always ends up becoming centralized due to reliability
  • Why do I need Protobufs, API specs?
  • I feel unsafe downloading/running code from Github without reading it first
  • I have a lot of computing devices and no way to manage them uniformly
  • I need concurrency without all of the baggage
  • Actor systems are pointless without a strong distributed story
  • I don't want to know, or care, about where my software is running
  • Personal computing research has been completely stagnant, despite major technology advances in the last 50 years
  • I think that E/Plan9 were ahead of their time and/or interesting but ultimately useless
  • Using Erlang doesn't make me feel good inside, and I don't know why
  • I want to host my own email, but due to a laundry list of problems, that's not possible

The four core components are:

  • Pleroma: the actual operating system
  • Hylic: a statically-typed language
  • Allo: the communication tool for interacting with Pleroma
  • Charisma: a novel IDE integrating voice and AST editing

Pleroma is versioned according to the solstices. w22 and s22 referring to the winter and summer solstices of 2022, respectively. Versions can't be patched unless there are major security issues, in which case one can append p and an incrementing number (e.g. w22p4). Otherwise, a version is frozen in time and all new development takes place on the next solstice release.