@pete Pleroma is in general much more performant, has more features and is more flexible than Mastodon. You can use alternative frontends, it actually comes with Mastodon's FE built in, but there's PleromaFE and Soapbox as well. The Message Rewrite Facility is extremely flexible.

I cannot understate the difference in performance and resource requirements between Mastodon and Pleroma. Mastodon is Ruby and Pleroma is Elixer. It's like a 10x difference.

Check it out, we've been very happy with it. I know people who have migrated from Mastodon to Pleroma, and they've been happy: https://pleroma.social/