Epicyon release version 1.7.0
It has been another year of highly exciting maintenance of the project, including the following changes:
- Option to block nostr bridges
- Added translations for content warning lists
- Reduced length of pages list to fit mobile screens
- Show the instance software type on each post
- Updated LLM crawler list
- Bug fix: referer domain (Andreas Schreiner)
- Changed default opacity for image watermarks
- Support for DeltaChat link within profile
- Default Terms Of Service changed for UK regulatory compliance
- Added latest version of hyperlegible font
- Ability to turn off recent posts preview on profile screen
- Changed "Twitter" terminology to "x.com"
- Limited support for quote toots and handling quote requests
- Added quote approval policy to posts
- Command option to check if a url is active
- Log media uploaded for each account
- When an account is suspended or removed its media is also suspended or removed
- Improve detection of whether the instance is online (internet available)
- Do not send posts if the instance is not online
- Improve handling of locations
- Add address to a post (eg. for events)
- Show address together with location map, when applicable
- Addresses shown on calendar events
- Ability to block nicknames with wildcards
- Support for event categories, and display of category with map
- Do not include seconds on event times
- Event categories treated the same as hashtags
- Person options screen text santitsation
- Current actor status shown on profile screen
- Donation and blog links shown on searched for profiles
- Rejection of BigTech corporate domains
- Reject script kiddie attempts to access dot files
- Default Terms Of Service indicates no intellectual property transfer
- More esoteric unicode sanitisation for screen readers
- Improve content warning list for AI slop websites
- Default Code of Conduct forbids synthetic content
- Warning for posts which only contain a single web link
- Updated Gitlab continuous integration script
- Export blogs in gemini and markdown format
- Indicate posts coming from mutuals
- Improved text mode browser page navigation
- Be explicit about having no AI as a feature
- Allow markdown-style headers within posts
- Allow gemini-style link syntax within posts
- Support for virtual locations
- Improved validation on post reactions
The open social web continues to evolve at a glacial pace, but at least this does make it fairly easy to keep up with. Web standards are still the best way to go, with other more adhoc ones running into difficulties. It is clearer than ever that its either the Open Web, or barbarism, with increasingly less grey area between. Anything which is too centralized or too under the control of a single company seems doomed to a horrible fate. There is something to be said for being the last robust system standing after a bunch of hasty vibecoded crap has collapsed in a steaming heap.
Epicyon is designed for an anticipated glorious long term future of the ActivityPub protocol. It is written in the most tedious trend-avoiding way possible, with few dependencies, no database to get corrupted, suitable for running on old hardware at minimum cost, and definitely with no "AI" features gratuitously foisted in. In challenging environments, it can also run from an onion or i2p address and use text mode browsers with no risk from javascript exploits. While the industrial silicon valley behemoths are busy pumping out information pollution, and sinking into the swamp of enshitification, the small and meek gain advantage.
Epicyon will always be AGPL licensed, to nark off the whingers. Long live the digital commons!
It 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.