The ActivityPub fediverse continues to attract interest and assimilate refugees from corporate social media. Over the last year, maintenance of Epicyon has been scrambling along like an eager puppy and there have been no major features added.

Changes in this version include:

• Improvements for text mode browsers, especially when displaying video and audio
• License can be separately specified for media
• Support for video transcripts
• Filters apply to question options
• Improved support for incoming markdown formatted posts
• Option not to show votes
• Ability to block based on nickname
• Added crawlable flag to posts
• Option to only receive replies from followers
• Better support for atom feeds
• Added blocked collection
• Can add a reason when blocking
• Added chat links to posts
• Added pending followers collection, for use by c2s
• List of supported FEPs within nodeinfo
• Option to block military top level domains
• Added Hebrew language
• Better Pixelfed compatibility, with capabilities
• Allow redirects on RSS feeds
• Show public shared items on profile
• Deprecate SBOM
• Better support for right-to-left languages
• Warning when replying to instances which may be blocking
• Daily events on calendar sorted by time
• Show whether accounts are mutuals
• Handle mixed left-to-right and right-to-left language posts
• Replies to public posts can default to unlisted scope
• More emojis
• Improved compatibility with Wordpress
• Block corporate LLM crawlers
• Show information about the author when replying to posts for improved context
• Added 37C3 theme
• Show the author on podcast screen, if specified
• Support for book reading statuses
• Improved handling of calendar events, despite lack of standardisation
• Twitter filter now includes its newer and sillier name

It's becoming clearer that the ActivityPub protocol might be the long term future of social media, with even the incumbents either starting to support it or making noises to that effect. There might be challenges which go along with becoming the mainstream. Perhaps some of the larger Mastodon instances could be bought by BigTech companies, or their admins be recruited as employees under corporate control. Another possible hazard would be if the protocol becomes endlessly extensible, creating a situation of infinite or unknowable attack surface. But whatever shenanigans may occur Epicyon has been designed with the assumption that the wider network is hostile and it should be able to continue regardless. More small instances rather than giant monoliths are the way to go.

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.