Matrix room: #epicyon:matrix.freedombone.net
gemini://freedombone.net/epicyon
Epicyon is an AGPL licensed ActivityPub protocol compliant federated social network server suitable for hosting a small number of accounts on low power systems requiring minimal maintenance, such as single board computers. It's the ActivityPub equivalent of an email server, storing posts as human readable JSON on file, rather than in a database. It also uses only a small amount of RAM.
Epicyon is written in Python with a HTML+CSS web interface and uses no javascript which makes display in a web browser very lightweight. It can run as a Progressive Web App on mobile. Just say "no" to boring social media sites packed with generic adverts and zombified corporate influencers.
Emojis, hashtags, photos, video and audio attachments, instance and account level blocking controls, moderation functions and reports are all supported. Build the community you want and avoid the stuff you don't. No ads. No blockchains or other Silicon Valley garbage.
Define the scope of your messages to reach the right people.
Schedule posts to be published at some time in the future. This can be useful for reminding yourself to do things (send your future self a direct message) or for creating a series of posts promoting some event, such as a festival or wedding.
Want to be reminded about what you said about a topic a month ago? The search screen allows you to do full text search on your own posts. Search on other posts can be done via the use of hashtags.
You don't need a separate blog system. Blog posts can be added and edited, and are federated as ActivityPub articles. They also have RSS version 2.0 feeds. People can comment on blog posts, but unlike other systems the moderation settings apply just the same as they do for any other fediverse post arriving at your server. This makes blog spam much easier to keep control over. You can subscribe to other people's blogs and they will appear in the right hand newswire column.
Epicyon supports many languages. Translations and emoji can easily be added. Alter the logo, backgrounds, terms of service and style to create a unique personality for your instance. Choose from a few different themes, or make a new one.
When creating a new post you can optionally also add a date, time and place. This will show up on the calendars of your followers, and makes organizing meetups or other community events simple. You can use message scopes to set up public events or private ones. To create reminders you can send yourself a DM with an event and it will appear on only your calendar.
Epicyon's absence of javascript makes it much more usable in shell based web browsers such as Lynx. As new web systems are deployed we should not be leaving anyone with minority use cases behind.
Some posts contain images and some don't. The media timeline enables you to view all your pet photos in one place.
If you want your instance to be primarily about posting and interacting with media then you can also enable the media instance option.
Barter and gift physical items or services with other people on your instance. Search for shared items which you might want or post items you no longer have a use for. Promote ride shares or available accomodation without any unnecessary companies in the middle. Pool resources between trusted friends to build solidarity and have fun.
Define a set of skills in your profile and search for other people who have the skills you need. Organize teams who can get things done!
Want to remember a particular link or reply to something later? Bookmark your favorite posts and view them on the Saves timeline.
Stay informed about the topics which people that you follow are highlighting. On the search screen there is a hashtag swarm.
Want to read the news from an RSS feed, or run your own Independent Media Center producing news and federating it through the network? Both of those are possible. The newswire gives you the capability of collectively moderating news as it arrives, and publishing your own articles. The administrator can assign moderator and editor roles to other users on an instance. Organize your community to overcome the limitations of corporate media.
You will need python version 3.7 or later.
On a Debian based system:
sudo apt install -y tor python3-socks imagemagick python3-setuptools python3-cryptography python3-dateutil python3-idna python3-requests python3-flake8 python3-django-timezone-field python3-pyqrcode python3-png python3-bandit libimage-exiftool-perl certbot nginx wget
The following instructions install Epicyon to the /opt directory. It's not essential that it be installed there, and it could be in any other preferred directory.
Clone the repo, or if you downloaded the tarball then extract it into the /opt directory.
cd /opt
git clone https://gitlab.com/bashrc2/epicyon
Create a user for the server to run as:
sudo su
adduser --system --home=/opt/epicyon --group epicyon
chown -R epicyon:epicyon /opt/epicyon
Link news mirrors:
mkdir /var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN
mkdir -p /opt/epicyon/accounts/newsmirror
ln -s /opt/epicyon/accounts/newsmirror /var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN/newsmirror
Create a daemon:
nano /etc/systemd/system/epicyon.service
Paste the following:
[Unit]
Description=epicyon
After=syslog.target
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
User=epicyon
Group=epicyon
WorkingDirectory=/opt/epicyon
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /opt/epicyon/epicyon.py --port 443 --proxy 7156 --domain YOUR_DOMAIN --registration open --debug
Environment=USER=epicyon
Environment=PYTHONUNBUFFERED=true
Restart=always
StandardError=syslog
CPUQuota=80%
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Activate the daemon:
systemctl enable epicyon
systemctl start epicyon
Create a web server configuration:
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/YOUR_DOMAIN
And paste the following:
proxy_cache_path /var/www/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=my_cache:10m max_size=10g
inactive=60m use_temp_path=off;
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name YOUR_DOMAIN;
access_log /dev/null;
error_log /dev/null;
client_max_body_size 31m;
client_body_buffer_size 128k;
limit_conn conn_limit_per_ip 10;
limit_req zone=req_limit_per_ip burst=10 nodelay;
index index.html;
rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name YOUR_DOMAIN;
ssl_stapling off;
ssl_stapling_verify off;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR_DOMAIN/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR_DOMAIN/privkey.pem;
#ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/YOUR_DOMAIN.dhparam;
ssl_session_cache builtin:1000 shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_timeout 60m;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!DSS';
add_header X-Frame-Options DENY;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
add_header X-Download-Options noopen;
add_header X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies none;
add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, noarchive";
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;
access_log /dev/null;
error_log /dev/null;
index index.html;
location /newsmirror {
root /var/www/YOUR_DOMAIN;
try_files $uri =404;
}
location / {
proxy_http_version 1.1;
client_max_body_size 31M;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forward-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forward-Proto http;
proxy_set_header X-Nginx-Proxy true;
expires epoch;
proxy_no_cache 1;
proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
proxy_connect_timeout 10080s;
proxy_send_timeout 10080;
proxy_read_timeout 10080;
proxy_buffer_size 64k;
proxy_buffers 16 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_request_buffering on;
proxy_buffering on;
proxy_cache my_cache;
proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504;
location ~ ^/(icons|images|media|emoji)/(.*)/(.*).(png|jpg|gif|webp|mp3|ogv|ogg|mp4) {
expires 7d;
proxy_pass http://localhost:7156;
}
location ~ ^/icons/(.*)/(like|repeat|calendar)(.*).(png|jpg|gif|webp|mp3|ogv|ogg|mp4) {
expires epoch;
proxy_no_cache 1;
proxy_pass http://localhost:7156;
}
location ~ ^/icons/(like|repeat|calendar)(.*).(png|jpg|gif|webp|mp3|ogv|ogg|mp4) {
expires epoch;
proxy_no_cache 1;
proxy_pass http://localhost:7156;
}
location ~ ^/users/(.*)/(image|banner).(png|jpg|gif|webp|mp3|ogv|ogg|mp4) {
expires epoch;
proxy_no_cache 1;
proxy_pass http://localhost:7156;
}
proxy_pass http://localhost:7156;
}
}
Enable the site:
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/YOUR_DOMAIN /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
mkdir /var/www/cache
Forward port 443 from your internet router to your server. If you have dynamic DNS make sure its configured. Add a TLS certificate:
certbot certonly -n --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --standalone -d YOUR_DOMAIN --renew-by-default --agree-tos --email YOUR_EMAIL
Restart your web server:
systemctl restart nginx
If you are using the Caddy web server then see caddy.example.conf
Now you can navigate to your domain and register an account. The first account becomes the administrator.
If you don't have access to the clearnet, or prefer not to use it, then it's possible to run an Epicyon instance easily from your laptop. There are scripts within the deploy directory which can be used to install an instance on a Debian or Arch/Parabola operating system. With some modification of package names they could be also used with other distros.
Please be aware that such installations will not federate with ordinary fediverse instances on the clearnet, unless those instances have been specially modified to do so. But onion instances will federate with other onion instances and i2p instances with other i2p instances.
To subsequently upgrade:
cd /opt/epicyon
git pull
chown -R epicyon:epicyon *
systemctl restart epicyon
