From my experience, both Mastodon and Pleroma are massively overcomplicated resource hogs that are hard to set up, configure, or navigate.

Pleroma too? Usually Elixir apps are much more efficient than RoR apps in my experience

Mastodon was created using the Ruby on Rails framework. Your able to quickly write applications at the cost of overhead from all the moving parts and the Ruby language in general (Though in recent years ruby has improved with the introduction of JIT into it's codebase).

Ah, that makes sense then.

I started out in Ruby years ago; wonderful language, doesn’t scale well.

Someone should rewrite it in Phoenix…

EDIT: Oh, someone did! https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma