Over the last year Epicyon has seen some major improvements, such as keyboard navigation, much faster cryptography and federated shared items. So it has been an unusually busy year for the project and I expect that future development is going to become less hectic and more incremental.

Like a Norfolk Terrier, the fediverse continues to be a lively and more friendly companion than the smog monster which the big commercial social networks have turned into. Even if it doesn't take over the world or isn't to everyone's taste, being able to run your own small social network sites the way you want to and on low cost hardware is a victory.

Epicyon is not intended to compete with Mastodon, and there are no public Epicyon instances to try. This is expected to be a self-hosted system for instances with ten user accounts or less. Don't scale up, scale out horizontally, like the rhizome.

Some of the changes since the previous version are:

• Switched from pycryptodome to python3-cryptography, with 20X speed increase
• Bug fixes to RSS feed parsing in the newswire
• Improved support for podcasts, including the podcast namespace
• Dyslexic font option
• Instance metadata improvements
• Exceeded 10K commits (if that means anything)
• Configurable keyboard navigation
• Emoji reactions 😄
• Support for tiny screen size on very small phones
• Improved support for groups
• Federation of shared items
• Shared items ontology, based on the Data Food Consortium
• Accommodation as a shared item category
• Mute button mutes the whole conversation
• Reply screen shows the post being replied to
• Onboarding screens
• Code architecture graphs
• Occupation field within profile
• DM bounce messages
• Broch mode dogpiling defense
• Support for authenticated fetch

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.