emerging from darkness

With the release of version 4 of Mastodon [1] there has been a problem of links to profile pages or conversation threads "going dark" within shell based browsers, such as Lynx [2]. In version 3.x you would get a text rendering of each page, but now you only get a terse *"To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript"* message.

I had been following the philosophy of *"do the minimum thing that works"* with Epicyon [3], but after Mastodon 4, just linking directly to Mastodon web content was no longer sufficient to be universally legible. So I have now replaced those direct links with a *conversation view* and a different way of viewing Mastodon profiles in which the html is all rendered by Epicyon itself. This brings back the otherwise Javascript-shrouded fediverse content, and also has the added advantage that it fully supports *authorized fetch*, which in Mastodon is known as "secure mode". It also makes the user interface more consistent looking in shell browsers.

[1] version 4 of Mastodon

[2] Lynx

[3] Epicyon