It looks like I've run into a show-stopper with the Pleroma backend, and the reason I didn't see this earlier was that I was only testing within a Tor browser. It's dependent on https://placehold.it for avatar images. Since !Freedombone is a self-hosting system there should be no dependencies on other sites. Having dependencies on other sites also introduces potential for spying and even more dubious stuff if the site in question is hostile.

So for now I'll deprecate the Pleroma backend. Maybe they will replace that with a first-party placeholder image thing eventually. Fortunately, this doesn't affect the frontend, which can still be used with gnusocial or postactiv.