We have just branched off the 2023.09-rc branches from the current development branch of Friendica, but it is Hacktober already! True at least for the RC we’ll stick to the milestone number If you want to help finding rough edges and bogus behaviour and hopefully fix them before the upcoming release, please checkout the new branch and report problems that you encounter.

The most notable changes in this release are:

• A new Bluesky connector, that allows you to use your Bluesky account from within Friendica. Crosspost to that platform and interact with your contacts there.
• We renamed some of our existing features in the hope to make it more easily to recognize what they are. Your contact groups are now called Circles, and the old public/private forums are now public/private Groups.
• A new feature are the Channels that are integrated into the network view of a Friendica user and offer a filtered view on the content posted contacts. This includes thinks like postings from contacts that you mostly interacted with, or postings that got the most interactive within the last 24 hours. We plan to give the users definition control over what a Channel definition looks like.

What is Friendica

Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Twitter.

How to use the 2023.09 RC Version of Friendica

If you want to help in the release process, you can checkout the 2023.09-rc branch from the main git repositories (because of technical problems the mirrors of the core and addons repository currently don’t work).
git fetch
git checkout 2023.09-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
Note that you only need to pull the composer dependencies in the core repository.

And yes, this means the main git repositories at git.friendi.ca/friendica/friendica-addons and github.com/friendica/friendica.

Should the upgrade process of the database get stuck

If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
What to do with Quirks

The 2023.09-rc phase is meant to identify and preferable resolve quirks and bugs that should not be in the 2023.10 release, but have slipped through so far. So if you switch your node to the 20232.09-rc version of Friendica, please let us know about rough edges you find, either at the issue tracker (github account required), in the support forum or in the development forum.

Thanks a lot for helping with the release

https://friendi.ca/2023/10/05/friendica-2023-09-release-candidate-available/