After a year accumulating bug fixes, whack-a-mole protocol updates and other incremental improvements Epicyon [1] version 1.5.0 - codename "Bounding Basset" - is hereby unleashed upon an unsuspecting internet.
The full changelog can be found here [2].
ActivityPub is still gaining popularity, mainly as the last best option. My impression is that the people leaving Twitter and joining the fediverse are not doing it because they're attracted to the features or decentralisation. They're doing it because there aren't other options which havn't been turned into unmoderated dumpster fires.
Epicyon is about small scale social networks, where the instances are either single user or squad sized with less than ten accounts. It is designed not to scale, and so is the inverse of the common tech paradigm. Small federated affinity groups are a lot more resistant to both technical and social adversaries, and it is possible to scale outwards rather than upwards. It has a html + css user interface with a Python backend, and can be used with javascript turned off or in a shell browser from a console.
If you like this approach you can support the project on Patreon [3].