After another year of maintenance Epicyon version 1.6.0 is released. There have been no major features added in the last year, but many smaller changes.

The situation of the fediverse has changed over the last year, with the rise in popularity of BlueSky. BlueSky is the true "Twitter alternative" in that it is structured in a similar way to be a "global town square" with centralized architecture. This also means that it suffers from the exact same issues which Twitter had before it was bought, and then trashed, by Musk. The people who rushed to adopt BlueSky are the same people who had a good time on the Jack-era Twitter, and were not subjected to Jack's many purges.

This doesn't mean that the fediverse is going away, and in fact I think it will outlast the competitors due to being based on W3C open standards and hence existing outside of the whims of any one particular company or organization. It just means that whenever there is a scandal on Musk's website then the casualties are far more likely to go to BlueSky rather than a federated social network. Centralized broadcast culture is different from the more horizontal culture of the fediverse.

Since BlueSky is running on venture capital it will either run out of money and fail, or be bought by one of the BigTech companies. Meta/Facebook would be the obvious buyer since it already has a fediverse presence via Threads. It also might turn out that after two or three years of running Threads, Meta pulls out from the fediverse altogether. Roughly three year experiments followed by shutdowns seem to be the norm amongst the BigTech companies, with only a few core services surviving.

So, apart from dissing BlueSky, what are the plans for the Epicyon project? I plan to keep maintaining it for as long as is feasible or as long as ActivityPub remains a socially relevant protocol. What does "relevant" mean? Well, as long as there is more than just me on the network and my timeline isn't empty, then it's relevant. I expect that the ActivityPub protocol is going to evolve at a glacial pace, and I will try to keep up with whatever is the common use of it, via FEPs or other documentation. It might be that end-to-end encrypted DMs are added to ActivityPub at some stage, and if so I might have to give up on the strictly no Javascript approach, because there's no way to do that only with HTML5.

One change over the last year is the addition of some anti-AI mitigations, to reduce the usefulness of Epicyon instances to large language model scrapers. If a known scraper asks for content, it will be fed garbage. Garbage in, garbage out. Grifting on other people's work without paying any regard to what their wishes for the use of that work are is unethical, and this is my tiny stand against it. People aren't neutral, and nor is the technology they create. Technology is expression, and how people choose to express themselves matters. Nothing about technology is inevitable, and everything created by people can be changed.

Epicyon is a sort of permacomputing project. It isn't trying to follow trends. You can run it and use a text mode browser in a command shell. This means that not only does the server not need to be a very high hardware spec but also the client side could be something very minimal. It makes sense to keep hardware running for as long as possible, to minimize cost and reduce the wasteful consumption for which the computing industry has become especially notorious.