For the last six months I've mainly been working on getting Epicyon into a workable condition and now it's quite usable. In 2020 I expect to shift back to Freedombone
A particular aim is to try to get the Rock64 image working and to also be able to run on an Orange Pi zero, which has a cost of about $10-15 for the original H2 model. The Orange Pi Zero only has 512MB RAM, but that would be enough to run an XMPP server, blog, probably Epicyon and maybe photo album. It could be a low cost entry level way for people to try running their own server in a smol package. Maybe paint the case in exotic colours, etc.
One thing which is very unglamorous but probably worth doing is to go through the 120+ STIG tests and for each try to make a best effort attempt to automatically fix security problems if they are detected. The thinking behind this is that it's not reasonable to expect a userop to be able to understand what these technical tests mean or what to do if one fails. To be practical the system has to be as self-healing as possible.
Also as usual review the list of apps and decide if any should be removed or if there are new web apps worth adding. PeerTube is currently in limbo since I noticed it using large amounts of CPU and so I'm wondering if there could be a simpler way of providing equivalent functionality, perhaps via Epicyon or a similar ActivityPub server. Maintaining large nodejs apps is definitely one of the most challenging tasks, because that development ecosystem is constantly shifting and there can often be many dependencies. Developers also often don't consider maintainability as a desirable attribute when writing new systems.
If you have any suggestions for Free Software AGPL-compatible apps which would make sense in a home server context then feel free to contact me.
It's not something that I'm very good at, but posting things about the project in places where there are a lot of eyeballs - especially people who might be interested in having more autonomy/freedom from the current tech industry dystopia.
Continuing with education and agitation. Often people don't realize that there is any alternative to sites like Twitter or chat apps like WhatsApp. It was only quite recently that I found out that WhatsApp is really just a single server proprietary implementation of XMPP, so it's good to point that out if people think that XMPP is too old and outdated.
In the Venn diagram there's definitely overlap between Free Software, Free Hardware, recyclers, people living off the grid, people who are just general techies but who are concerned about the direction things are going and also people involved in various kinds of liberation struggles who want more control over their communications.