The last year in the fediverse has been quite eventful, with a massive tidal wave of new users fleeing the sinking ship of Twitter and its app developers being unceremoniously dumped. But so far as Epicyon has been concerned it has been calm sailing. There have been no major features added over the last year, but as always there have been many small improvements and bug fixes. These include:

Theme and theme designer improvements A buy button for when you want to link to something that you're selling General security improvements Conversation view, avoiding direct links to the Mastodon user interface Progressive Web App improvements Quote Toot suppression Copyright notices added to individual posts Improved display of remote hashtags Support for auto-linking scientific paper references Edit button Improved calendar events Added a user manual Hashtag maps for crowdsourced geolocations Option to expire old posts Better emoji support Included an updated version of the ActivityPub specification Unicode fonts no longer bypass filters vCard support Improved podcast support Additional language support: Korean, Turkish, Bengali, Dutch, Ukranian, Swahili, Persian and Greek Bold Reading accessibility feature Improved compatibility with shell browsers Additional format fupport: opus Improved account level control over display of images Can set the language when creating a new post, for multilingual users Improved support for Questions/Votes

The present time is an interesting juncture in the history of the web. The prospects for the social web appear brighter than ever, with former Twitter app developers switching over to supporting the fediverse. There are still many future challenges, but it seems that systems backed by open protocols are now out-innovating the moribund commercial silos. This will rattle some chains, because movements built upon a foundation of federated social sites are likely to be more robust than the whimsical or illusory nonsense on Twitter.

"many e-citizens woke up their consciousnesses, becoming aware of what a centralized system used for the most popular applications (generally social network platforms) entails...Probably, those e-citizens moved to the fediverse, becoming fedizens." -- L’Associazione data Protection Officer

So it's really down to us to keep things small and decentralized. To become the networked islands of organization in a chaotic world, and scaling out rather than up.

Epicyon can be downloaded as a gzipped file, or you can get the latest version from the git repo. For installation instructions see the main page. To upgrade an existing instance, make sure that you have the python3-cryptography package installed then do a git pull, chown and restart the daemon. Upgrades to web systems do not need to be a huge drama.