Unlike popular microblogging services such as Twitter or Weibo, Pleroma can be self-hosted and operated by anyone with a server and a web domain, a combination commonly referred to as an instance.

[2][full citation needed] It was named after the religious concept of pleroma, or the totality of divine powers.

The backend was built using the Elixir programming language and the Phoenix web framework, and uses PostgreSQL for its database.

This release drops support for the OStatus protocol due to a lack of usage and active maintenance, introduces a new user interface for administration and adds post reactions using Unicode emoji.

[20][21] Pleroma has been described as being more lightweight than alternatives like Mastodon, due to being less intensive on system resources and requiring fewer software dependencies.

[22] Pleroma's default post length limit is 5000 characters, and can be configured by instance administrators.

[24] Posts are created by default using plaintext, but can also be translated from a variety of markup languages such as HTML, BBCode and Markdown.

[26] This system has been used as a method to study how content moderation works in the Fediverse and the challenges that it faces, since the list of active policies is publicly shown by default through both the API and the frontend.