Forem: Reuben Walker, Jr.

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 10 April, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:59:15 +0000

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

It's your weekly review of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism. We aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening authoritarianism.

IMHO, the best way to do that is to use tools from the Techno Anarchist Manifesto to build your own site(s) to participate in the Open Media Network. Then you should share it (them) via Real Simple Syndication (RSS), the Fediverse, and possibly a newsletter or podcast. This approach is similar to what some call the IndieWeb and its POSSE philosophy.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them. And do the same with a RSS feed reader.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Websites/CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

Cloudfare writes:

WordPress powers over 40% of the Internet. It is a massive success that has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and created a global community of WordPress developers.

But the WordPress open source project will be 24 years old this year. Hosting a website has changed dramatically during that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 didn’t exist. In the intervening years, that task has gone from renting virtual private servers, to uploading a JavaScript bundle to a globally distributed network at virtually no cost.

It’s time to upgrade the most popular CMS on the Internet to take advantage of this change.

Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

Joost de Valk says:

When Cloudflare launched EmDash CMS on April 1st, the reactions came fast — from Matt Mullenweg himself, from Hendrik Luehrsen at Kraut.press, and from Brian Coords.

Each piece approached EmDash differently, but together they crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for years: WordPress’s deepest technical problems aren’t at the surface. They’re architectural. And the WordPress project keeps treating them as cosmetic.

WordPress needs to refactor, not redecorate

Anything that simplifies WordPress would be welcome, especially if it's open-source. Which unfortunately, this really isn't. I tried to get it working locally and couldn’t. It’s effectively a Cloudflare only product for now. Plus while it’s built on top of Astro, it has the stink of AI code all over it.

Rich Tabor comments:

You’ve heard about EmDash, Cloudflare’s “spiritual successor to WordPress.” It’s an interesting demo with some good ideas. But a successor to WordPress? Not quite.

Just Another CMS

Sadly the ease of working with AI agents is what he is most impressed with.

Personally, I am sick of open-source projects shoving AI in where it’s not wanted (core code vs optional plugins/modules). So, I am going to put my time where mouth is and stop daily WordPress and Drupal coverage. An item might make it into a TPF post every now and again. They are evolving into overcomplicated clusterfucks anyway.

Having said that, Drupal has one of the best communities going. Its corporate-oriented foundation leadership is just enshittifying. And agencies have always been the tail wagging the Drupal dog. Its why DrupalCamp Grenoble, which I attended and sponsored this week will be my last one. And that’s frustrating. You government and nonprofit Drupalers need to push back real hard against this shit.

Open Media Network - Site/Blog/CMS

And we have the first exception to our new rule:

How to deactivate all AI features from Jetpack on Wordpress 😉

CybersecKyle says:

I Believe in Human Websites. I Still Care About Polish.

Same here.

Toni Notes notes:

Simple systems age better than impressive ones

That's why we preach KISS and another reason we're dropping WordPress and Drupal coverage. I am going to primarily concentrate on markdown-based, database-free, static site tech going forward. Plus Bonfire. 😉

RunTimeTerror posts:

Hello from Sveltia CMS!

Great blog name. 🧛🏼‍♀️

Astro

Astro announces:

Astro 6.1

PurpleSyringa opines:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Web

I think they mean Web 1.0.

I am not sure if Astro is simple enough for us to endorse and cover long-term, but at least you can use vanilla Javascript. Personally, it reminds me too much of my fullstack webdev bootcamp. 😱

Bear

A Barrel of Words goes:

From HackerNews to Bear

Backdrop CMS

Backdrop CMS shares:

Backdrop CMS Core Priorities: We Want Your Input

Tell them if they want to add a lot of disaffected Drupal users to stay the fuck away from AI in their core.

Ghost

Closing Tags explores:

Theme Development for Ghost

Great blog name.

Build Awesome

Web Awesome announces:

Web Awesome is now available on our public CDN

Write.as / WriteFreely

Musing Studio announces:

Since our Markdown preview has been working well on WriteAs, we'll also be bringing it to WriteFreely in v0.17

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

TechPolicy shows us:

How the Internet Can Survive an Era of Rivalry and Fragmentation

Interoperability and standards are key to freedom. ⛓️‍💥

CNet reviews:

This Privacy Smartphone Blocks Audio and Video Snooping at the Flick of a Switch

NLNet announces:

57 Projects Receive NGI Zero Grants to Fix the Internet

Some of those relevant here include YunoHost, Matdrige Spaces, FunFedi, Open PGP, LinuxBoot, and Loops Live.

Browsers

Waterfox announces:

6.6.11 - Security fixes and feature preview

Writing

LibreOffice announces:

The New Writer Guide 26.2 Just Arrived

The Document Foundation says:

Let’s put an end to the speculation

The Register reports:

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Creative

KdenLive announces:

La version 26.04 RC de Kdenlive est prête pour passer en test.

Linux/Open Android

9to5Linux reports:

KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktop Environment Is Coming on June 16th, Here’s What to Expect

OpenSSL 3.6.2 Is Now Available for Download with Important Security Fixes

Flatpak 1.16.4 Linux App Sandboxing Framework Brings Important Security Fixes

F-Droid has:

F-Droid Basic was updated to 2.0-alpha6

In the mirror universe

This week's featured OMN tool

Kagi

Kagi Search is a fast, private search engine. Orion Browser is a fast, zero-telemetry, browser.

Kagi

OMN Programming

Infrequently says:

The Web Is An Antitrust Wedge

So, use PWAs and get your government to force Google and Apple to stop suppressing them.

Speaking of, Atif Afzal asks:

Are web apps really slower than native?

Joel Chrono examines:

Verifying human authorship with human.json

Drupal founder, Dries Buyaertd is:

Introducing headers.dev

Git

Martin Lysk looks at:

SQLite on Git, Prologue: Why do we need random access in git

Crazy Milk says:

Ciao, GitHub!

Molto bene.

SO is:

Migrating issues from GitHub to Codeberg

Nice heading font, So.

HTML

Squarespace has:

Squarespace & Web Standards: How We Helped Bring HTML Video & Audio Lazy Loading to Today’s Browsers

Henry Catalini Smith looks at:

Inspecting HTML elements that disappear on blur

Oida, is des org! explores:

Enhance Dialogs with the closedby Attribute

HTMX

Alchemists examine:

HTMX Configuration

CSS

CSS Tricks has:

Looking at New CSS Multi-Column Layout Wrapping Features

Alternatives to the !important Keyword

A great one to bookmark.

Roland demonstrates:

Scroll Spy with Pure CSS using scroll-target-group

Web Components

Jay Sherby looks at:

Learning Lit with 7GUIs and TodoMVC

JavaScript

Polypane shares:

The Intl API: The best browser API you're not using

AI

Erik “kusma” Faye-Lund explores:

Open-source and AI

Matt Taggart writes:

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

Fantastic article.

Han, not Solo examines:

The AI Great Leap Forward

This is worthy of a featured article. Read it.

Other

XWIKI shares an:

Webinar overview | XWiki vs. Confluence: open-source knowledge management and migration demo

This week's featured programming tool

HTMX

Access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and SSE directly in HTML.

HTMX

I only attended three sessions at DrupalCamp Grenoble, one on caching and two on HTMX. So, it gets the nod this week.

ActivityPub

FediLab announces:

HolosDiscover 1.3.0 has been released!

Internet Archive Blogs shows:

How DWeb Camp is Being Built in Berlin

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

ActivityPub Rocks

This site is maintained by the current steward of the ActivityPub stack of standards.

ActivityPub Rocks

Fediverse

Hamish Campbell has:

What happened over the last ten years on our Fediverse path

Beyond Blocking: Building Trust Infrastructure for the Open Web

Fast Company reports:

The web can still be wonderful, and Flipboard’s Surf proves it

I agree and have used Flipboard for years as well as being one of the first Surf users.

Stefan Hayden announces:

Liveblog - a new mastodon client to quickly post durring live events

FediTips reports:

The free open source Fediverse photo platform Vernissage is now fully available in the iOS app store

Mastodon wants your input for:

Designing Collections

Connected Places has its:

FR158 – What is Mastodon for?

Bonfire

LAUTI announces:

LAUTI Updates 2026

It's being integrated into Bonfire!

Lamb announces:

Lamb 0.8.0

Web Mentions

Max Glenister looks at:

Baking webmentions into the build

RSS

Ben Crowder announces:

Digest

NetNewswire announces:

NetNewsWire 7.0.4 for Mac — new iCloud features

XMPP

Thanos Apollo is:

Bringing jabber.el Back From the Dead

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Kat Excellence shares:

Thoughts on ATmosphereConf as an ATProto Newbie

Connected Places has:

Reflections on AtmosphereConf

Bailey's Retrospective announces:

PDS MOOver: The mobile app?

Any thing that migrates people off Bluesky and elsewhere in the ATmosphere is a great tool.

Brittany Ellich explains:

Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)

I would say hedge your bets. Just don’t join Bluesky. The same goes for mastodon.social BTW.

Jake Lazaroff explores:

Building More Resilient Local-First Software with atproto

Blacksky wants some input from the community:

Blacksky Algorithms’ Policy Towards Agentic Coding

Democracy Tech

Relational Tech Project looks interesting:

Remixable Tools

A good way to build something for your community.

Decidim has:

Nos infrastructures démocratiques ne peuvent pas être propriétaires : à propos de l'acquisition d'Open Source Politics

eMail / Newsletters

Ghost examines:

Saving your subscribers

Buttondown announces:

Recovery codes for two-factor authentication

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse or at thefulcrum.eurosky.social for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 03 April, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:20:29 +0000

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them. And do the same with a RSS feed reader.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

Anil Dash wrties:

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can't just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying "enough". And interestingly, opportunities might exist where the tycoons least expect it.

I saw Mike Masnick's recent piece where he argued that one of the things that might enable a resurgence of the open web might be... AI. It would seem counterintuitive to anyone who's read everything I've shared here to imagine that anything good could come of these same technologies that have caused so much harm.

But ultimately what matters is power. It is precisely because technologies like LLMs have powers that the authoritarians have rushed to try to take them over and wield them as effectively as they can. I don't think that platforms owned and operated by those bad actors can be the tools that disrupt their agenda.

I do think it might be possible that the creative communities that built the web in the first place could use their same innovative spirit to build what could be, for lack of a better term, called "good AI". I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.

Endgame for the Open Web

I think we should use the strategies in the Techno Anarchist Manifesto to keep the web open.

The Newsmast Foundation shares:

Building Trust in the Open

Good stuff from a good writer.

Open Media Network - Site/Blog/CMS

Flipboard’s Surf announces:

Surf Launches First Social Websites with Publishers and Creators

Very innovative from a company! We won't be creating a Surf site buy you can join our 45K plus followers on Flipboard.

Samuel Lison announces:

FediHome

Very innovation from an individual and a great OMN/TAM project. It would be perfect if the repository was on Codeberg. ;)

LMNO answers:

How does LMNO work?

Like FediHome above and Bear below it's all markdown for content. That’s cool.

Pure Blog shows us:

How to Create A Blog Archive

This seems interesting if a little PHP does not scare you.

Bear

Kami's Corner shows us:

How to hide the upvote button

SLMT comments:

On feed curation and blog discovery

Sharan has:

Bear Blog 1st Anniversary

I started a Bear blog for syndication purposes (POSSE). Follow us there if that’s your thing. We can just paste our post's markdown file there and it’s good to go. So, easy peasy like our dev.to account.

And we did the same with Leaflet. If ATProto is your roll, follow us there.

WordPress

Make WordPress has:

Extending the 7.0 Cycle

WordPress is moving into Drupal clusterfuck territory now in terms of over-complication and enterprise ass-kissery.

Dimensions Support Enhancements in WordPress 7.0

The Gutenberg Times explores:

WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth

Custom CSS for individual blocks is nice.

Remkus de Vries examines:

WordPress Page Builders and Performance (The Brutal Truth)

Kinsta shows us:

How to build PHP-only Gutenberg blocks

Cool stuff. Just make sure you have the Gutenberg plugin installed (for now).

Learn WP Theme Dev shows us:

How I made the Interactivity API finally click

Coen Jacobs looks at:

When your words get ahead of your product

Great post.

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Home Assistant: Connect your Ghost publication to devices in the real world

Publii

Corey Snipes shows us how to:

Add a 'human.json' file to a Publii Website

Drupal CMS

Drupal Odyssey has:

Automating Social Media Posts from Drupal with n8n, Claude, and Postiz

The Architect's Dilemma: Knowing When to Put Drupal Down

Also, if you don’t want to have put up with unnecessary AI horseshit and be associated with clueless corporate types.

HashBangCode explores:

Drupal 11: Building A "Load More" Feature For Paginating Nodes Using HTMX

Dripyard shares:

Dripyard's Drupal Contributions for March 2026

They are a few of the volunteer contributors that make Drupal semi-usable.

Build Awesome

Build Awesome (11ty) announces:

The Possum Mascot, now with additional Awesome

Micro.blog

Micro.blog announces:

About Inkwell

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Framablog has:

Framadate peaufine sa peau neuve

Internet Policy Review examines:

Mining the commons: AI extraction, Wikipedia, and the case for a multi-stakeholder settlement

Dries Buyaert looks at:

The Sovereignty Prerequisite

Neisse reports:

Microsoft alternative: Nextcloud and Ionos develop open-source ‘Euro-Office’

Collabra asks:

A European Office Suite?

The Document Foundation asks:

Euro-Office: sovereign in name only, or in reality too?

Chat

Delta Chat announces:

Zero metadata, group descriptions, native audio/video calls and much more!

Starlight announces:

The Starlight IRC Network

Signal announces:

Signal to group notifications in chats and groups

Browsers

Waterfox celebrates:

15 Years of Forking

Servo has:

February in Servo: faster layout, pause and resume scripts, and more!

Writing

LibreOffice says:

ODF is the future, OOXML is the past

Chris Maiorana shares:

Let the commits tell the story

I hope to start playing a Git videogame in the fall to improve my eroded skills learned at a bootcamp almost eight years ago. I too want to use it for book writing.

Creative

GIMP announces:

GIMP 3.2.2 Released

New Color Mode Coming to GIMP

9to5Linux reports:

OBS Studio 32.1.1 Is Out to Improve the Audio Mixer and Audio Deduplication

Linux

PostmarketOS is:

Introducing Duranium: a more reliable postmarketOS

SailfishOS shares:

Sailfish OS update from Jolla

F-Droid shows us:

How to pre-add repositories to F-Droid in Android ROMs (Important changes in 2.0)

This week's featured OMN tool

Shotcut

Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor.

Shotcut

OMN Programming

Andrew Nesbitt explores:

The Roles of Packages

AKA, why programming has become too fucking complicated.

LLBBL Blog asks:

Is There Something Better Than JSON?

Git

Lonami is:

Ditching GitHub

Bon, tres bon.

Markdown

Matt Duggan shows us why:

Markdown Ate The World

HTML

Frank M Taylor says:

You Don’t Know HTML Tables

CSS

CSS Wizardry asks:

What Is CSS Containment and How Can I Use It?

Frontend Masters examines:

The Drill-Down Menu with Details and @scope

Vivian Voss looks at:

The Native Popover That Positions Itself

Nice site design Vivian.

Web Components

I ran across Chasket this week.

JavaScript

Frontend Masters shares:

What To Know in JavaScript (2026 Edition)

AI

Smashing Frames looks at "AI":

Dissolving the social

Neowin reports:

Microsoft Copilot is now injecting ads into pull requests on GitHub

Sloppish explores:

The Siege of Open Source

David Duymelinck says:

Don't just git worktree

Joost de Valk shares:

Ask Joost: AI-powered answers from my blog

A mostly legitimate use of "AI".

MilkCrunch says:

The Best AI Integration Is a Folder

I wonder if it would work with Joplin. Not that I would use it.

If you are interested, here are my thoughts on ethical AI use.

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki says:

You Don't Need to Pay $200/Month

Jannis's company, Magic Pages hosts this site.

Other

DDEV shares:

Its March newsletter

XWIKI shares:

Strengthening global services: XWiki partners with MassiveGRID

This week's featured programming tool

Codeberg Pages

Codeberg has an announcement:

Codeberg Pages

BTW, you can deploy a Publii site on Codeberg Pages.

ActivityPub

Evan Prodromou shares a note about:

Activity Streams

ActivityPub for WordPress says:

Discover more of the Fediverse with tags.pub

Nokoto looks at:

Improving external comment privacy without relying on unpubished comments

The past two post illustrate why WordPress is mostly usable and Drupal is barely usable. And by usable I mean for an intelligent non-developer.

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

The Activity Pub Book

Evan wrote:

The Activity Pub Book

Fediverse

The Social Web Foundation has a:

New Report: AI, Agency and Protocols– Power and Governance in Open Social Networks

Surf announces:

Version 1.0.383 of Surf is now live

Souverain has:

Le Fediverse, une nouvelle étape durable dans l’auto-hébergement

Mario Vavti notes:

Hubzilla 11.2 Released!

The Simple Notes addon brings the Simple Notes app to Hubzilla

Harald announces:

Superblock v3.0 addon for Hubzilla

Holos has:

The state of Holos

Holos will support custom root domains

FediLab has more:

With Holos, you can have your identity on your own domain.

An UnTrackMe update

BSD Café announces:

Today, we're introducing three things.

Sounds, great.

Zulip announces:

Zulip Server 11.6 security release

Yancey Strickler shares:

Antienshittification

Dark Forest Operating System sounds like a completely private version of what Bonfire is doing but using something similar to ATProto.

RSS

Journal J show us how to:

Improve the RSS experience of your blog readers

This is a great idea.

Piccalilly shares:

A quick guide to creating syndication feeds

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

The Knight Foundation explains:

Why Knight Foundation Invested in Bluesky

Maybe there will be an independent ATProto Foundation someday and projects can avoid the taint of Bluesky.

And hey @knightfoundation.org, I am sure the Social Web Foundation is looking for funding. Hedge your bets there and get a Fediverse handle for fucks sake.

And read this -> Rebuilding Journalism as Commons (not a product).

Nick Gerakines explores:

Building AIP: An ATProtocol Authorization Gateway

Leaflet announces:

Leaflet Pro: power tools for publishers

Trezy Who has:

The Marshmallow Test: Bluesky signals it's willing to eat its young

So after celebrating their so-called community of ATProto developers (like Leaflet’s standard.site efforts and Germ's for DM or Graze Social’s tools), Bluesky goes and acts like a box of VC-funded cunts.

He also has a followup article you should read if you read the one above.

Proof of Work

To be fair, Bluesky's CEO called Trezy and apologized.

Trezy notes: The tension is that Bluesky holds the keys. No matter how good a community proposal is, it doesn't become real on AT Protocol without Bluesky's buy-in at the protocol level. That's a problem. You can't claim to be building an open protocol while one company retains veto power over what gets adopted.

The Next Web reports:

Bluesky’s new Attie app uses AI to give you full control over your social feed

One to avoid.

TechCrunch reports:

Bluesky’s new AI tool Attie is already the most blocked account other than J. D. Vance

Ha! Even the non-techies don't want this type of shit.

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse or at thefulcrum.eurosky.social for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 27 March, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:23:20 +0000

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them. And do the same with a RSS feed reader.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

Professor Patsch writes:

I understand that in order to get people away from the places that are damaging to them, we should first provide an alternative that feels familiar.

I posit that we have done that, and the big storm of people into the Fediverse has not happened, and probably will not ever happen.

So where does this leave us, as activists, technologists, and dreamers?

First off, I think it’s incredibly freeing. We have a license to try new things! We can come up with new ideas in small groups, driven by the actual wants and needs of us as the wider fediverse, small friend groups, and individual human beings.

And best of all: advertisers are not our masters, and scaling is not our dogma!

Can we have a more “social” media?

This coincides with my opinion that the Fediverse is for communities not the masses.

Hamish Campbell writes:

The Open Media Network is simple flows, not platforms, it’s a way of thinking about media as flows of objects moving through a network. If people can’t picture how the system works, they can’t govern it. Think: pipes, flows, and holding tanks. Content flows. People shape the flow.

Let’s try and simplify the OMN

A fantastic explanation.

Open Media Network Site CMSs

Joost de Valk of Yoast SEO fame asks:

Do you need a CMS?

And even if the answer is yes, you still probably need an SSG one.

Timeland shares a similiar story:

How I Migrated This Blog from WordPress to Astro

Forbes reports:

Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website

Is enshittification exponential?

Madblog

Fabio Manganiello has:

Support for post visibility in Madblog

Support for About Me and custom nav links

WordPress

WordPress has:

WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 2

WP Packages is Working the Way Open Source Should

Make WordPress publishes its:

WordPress 6.9.2 retrospective

Alex Kirk announces:

Friends 4.0

Learn WP Theme Dev shows us:

How to set default block styles in a block theme

The Repository reports:

WordPress Is Colliding With AI — and Nobody Had ‘None’ on Their Bingo Card

KISS is driving this but using AI to do so is still an immoral choice 95% of the time.

Terence Eden explores:

Adding human.json to WordPress

Great idea.

ClassicPress

ClassicPress announces:

ClassicPress Version 2.7.0 is Out!

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Members-only podcasts

Synaps Media is:

Launching Free Ghost Theme Demo Hosting: Starting with ThemeX Studio

John Nolan says:

I built a CLI for Ghost

Ben Werdmuller shares:

His thoughts on it

Drupal CMS

I have selected my schedule for DrupalCamp Grenoble. Which, incredibly does not have any DrupalCMS or Canvas sessions. There are a few tangental and HTMX ones at least. Anyway, if you are attending, get in touch and I will treat you to a few (commiseration) beverages of your choice. Because ⬇️.

I am going to the camp to decide if DrupalCMS 2.0 is easy enough for the average person to use for small sites (historically it's sucked at usability). And also to determine if we keep covering it here. I think the answers will be no and that it doesn't tightly fit with our objectives.

And this was before they went all in on AI cuntitry and fascism at DrupalCon North America. It's a shame because other than its tone-deaf, clueless, and business-suckup leadership, Drupal has a great community.

It will probably be my last DrupalCamp. I definitely have no interest in using it personally anymore.

Wim Leers opines about a:

Validation-first

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

The Image Cooperation shares:

Why we started Image Cooperative

A great TAM project.

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras examines:

Maintaining a human web: human.json & the 'AI' blacklist

Kagi announces:

Small Web Just Got Bigger

Cool. It's good for curation now that it has categories.

Terence Eden recommends:

Caboom! Comment Anywhere, Bring Onto Own Media

A good strategy.

Framablog has:

L’alternative

The European Commission looks at the:

Cyber Resilience Act - Open source

Clingendael shares:

From Common Worries to Digital Commons: How Europe Can Stop Renting Clouds and Build Its Own

Open_Future asks:

Public Money, Public Platforms?

On a related note, the Digital Public Goods Alliance explores:

5 Surprising Truths We Learned About Open Source in Government

Interesting.

VPN

Mullvad announces:

Mullvad Browser Alpha moves to Firefox Rapid Release and adds Linux ARM support

Chat

Signal has:

Signal is working on the ability for admins to end group chats for everyone

Insights into the latest encryption developments at Signal from the Real World Crypto Symposium

Signal brings cross-platform on-device backups to Android beta

Browsers

9to5Linux reports:

Firefox 149 Web Browser Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New

Prepare to update your Zen, Librewolf, and Waterfox browsers soon.

Servo has its:

Highlights from last week

Cloud

How to Geek explores:

6 Google Drive replacements for Linux

Writing

LibreOffice has:

Dear Europe: Germany has shown the way forward

Now that I'm a retired solo/social-preneur I mainly use markdown. But, this is still great to see!

The Document Foundation announces the simultaneous availability of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6

It brings better markdown support which is tres bon.

9to5 Linux reports:

Calibre 9.6 Adds New Card-Based View of Full-Text Search Results with Book Covers

Creative

Where's Your Ed shares:

Premium: The Hater's Guide To Adobe

9to5Linux reports:

OpenShot 3.5 Open-Source Video Editor Released with New Default Timeline

Krita 6.0 Digital Painting App Released with Wayland Color Management Support

Linux

A.B. Murrow says:

I Don't Want Birthday Gifts From Systemd, Even Optionally

GrapheneOS announces:

GrapheneOS version 2026032000 released

Sailfish OS has:

Sailfish Community News, 19th March 2026 - Meetup in Lyon next Saturday

PostmarketOS has:

New postmarketOS installations now by default use sudo-rs instead of doas

Unmaintained devices to be archived after v26.06

9to5Linux reports:

openSUSE Releases Agama 19 Installer with Many New Features and Improvements

Fedora announces:

The forge is our new home

They are moving from rolling their own to Forgejo.

Hosting / Serving

Co-op Cloud has its:

March 2026 community update

You can deploy Bonfire and NodeBB with it among many more cool apps.

Elena Rossini continues a series:

A newbie's guide to self-hosting with YunoHost. Part 5: Upgrades & Maintenance

This week's featured OMN tool

Drupito

Drupito is a hands off, coding-optional, maintainance-free version of Drupal CMS built with Drupal under the hood.

Drupito

It's Drupal with less horseshit.

OMN Programming

Geo Coop looks at:

The Best Creative Commons License for the Solidarity Economy

Git

The Register reports:

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Codeberg or Forgejo, peeps

David Viramontes explores:

Using Git Worktrees for Parallel Branch Development

Markdown

Armand Halbert says:

Vim + Markdown = Writer's Heaven

Vlad Rișcuția has:

DevLog 6: Extending Markdown

HTML

W3C shares:

Two editors for HTML slides

A great idea and two new OMN/TAM tools.

CSS Tricks explores:

Experimenting With Scroll-Driven corner-shape Animations

Slick little effect.

Kilian Valkhof examines:

Progressive enhancement as a benefit of CSS Nesting

Web Components

I have been following this PWA-focused project for a while and its ready for production.

Elena

Ariel Saliminen explains its:

Progressive Web Components

JavaScript

ESLint announces:

ESLint v10.1.0 released

Frontend Masters looks at:

Shadow DOM Focus Delegation: Getting delegatesFocus Right

AI

Matthias Ott explores:

The Shape of Friction

Agents of Chaos publishes:

An exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model–powered agents

Any fucks that use AI should read this.

Other

XWIKI announces:

Release Notes for XWiki 18.2.0-rc-1

Sasha Corti explains:

Why Running Redis in a Local Docker Container Is a Smart Move for Developers

This week's featured programming tool

Elena

As mentioned above its:

Elena

ActivityPub

The Real Grunfink announces:

I've just published version 2.91 of Snac

New Public announces:

Open Social Awards

If you're eligible, pat yourself on the back by applying. You could get some deserved recognition and cash.

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Social Docs

They're the comprehensive developer resource for ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the Fediverse.

Social Docs

Fediverse

FediSuite announces:

Social media management for the Fediverse with a strong self-hosting focus

Mastodon announces:

A Redesign for Profiles

Holos announces:

Release 1.0.0

An automatic encrypted recovery system

Letting you use your root domain as your identity while still using a subdomain for the relay

Fedilab Apps announces:

UntrackMe will be updated soon

Funkwhale announces:

Funkwhale 2.0.0 release

Loops has:

Introducing Starter Kits

Starter Kits are federated

I added an account and created a starterkit. It will take a while to build up of course. But, you can follow it now.

Johnnny Wesley explores:

Replacing Disqus with Mastodon Comments

Another great though small OMN-friendly project/technique.

Bonfire

Newsmast announces:

The new Newsmast Foundation website

This is a mainstream news-oriented approach similar to what I am thinking about with Manade.

Here's Bonfire's FOSDEM presentation:

Bonfire: Modular Communication Tools on the Open Social Web

POST AS HTML

Movim announces:

Movim to ensure that UI is keyboard navigable

Slidge announces:

The Slidge family is growing

RSS

Alexandre Dulaunoy advises:

Bring Back RSS for Operational Security

P2P

Sammy shares:

30 years of learning the hard way about p2p networks

p2Panda says:

We've been busy implementing p2panda's high-level Node API!

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

A New Social announces:

Long-Form Comes To Bridgy Fed

Daniel Holmgren shares:

Permissioned Data Diary 4: The Big Picture

ATProto is:

Introducing Hubble: A Public Mirror for the Whole Atmosphere

Beaver(?) announces:

ATProto Support

Ryosuke examines:

Free Auth and DB using ATProto

Read this one in your browser's reading mode.

Democracy Tech

Le Grand Continent asks:

American heresy: should Peter Thiel be burned at the stake?

One can hope.

Open Source Observatory reports:

Voxit polling platform launches European collaboration

eMail / Newsletters

9to5 Linux reports:

Thunderbird 149 Email Client Enables Exporting of Selected Address Book Cards

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse or at thefulcrum.eurosky.social for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

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The Programmer's Fulcrum: 20 March, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:59:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them. And do the same with a RSS feed reader.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

Our move to France was completed last week so we are back from our one week break. Thus this week's newsletter is a double edition.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

Hamish Campbell writes:

Forty years ago, if you wanted to express a political opinion publicly you needed a newspaper, radio station, a public meeting or to stand in a square shouting. Now you can reach thousands of people instantly. But there is a downside that dotcons smoke and mirror online engagement replaces the slow work of institution-building. Posting, sharing, and reacting can feel like participation, but it has very little role in building the durable structures needed for any long-term change.

The goal is not to create another platform, it is to expand federated / p2p infrastructure for collective media and collective politics. The original openweb worked because it supported networks of communities, independent publishers and grassroots movements. The corporate dotcons replaced this with extractive platforms designed for profit and control.

KISS rebuilding of the commons means rebuilding the social infrastructure of media, not just tools, but institutions and practices that persist to allow collective voices to organise and persist.

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

Joan Westenberg writes:

The Rule of Saint Benedict, written around 530 AD, organized monastic life around a principle that sounds almost radical in the context of modern productivity culture: ora et labora, pray and work. The monks built things.

Work was understood as a form of devotion, valuable in itself rather than as a means to accumulate wealth or status. The monks built in private, for people they could see and know, finding meaning in the craft itself.

The Noble Path as I see it is to build a small, imperfect, deeply useful thing and give it away to the people who need it. Skip the landing page and the waitlist. A thing that works, offered freely, in the oldest and most human tradition of making things for each other.

The monks would understand.

The Noble Path

Again our constant message is build things for communities.

The Guardian reports:

A video, released recently by the Norwegian Consumer Council, is an absurdist take on a serious issue; it is part of a wider, global campaign aimed at fighting back against the “enshittification”, or gradual deterioration, of digital products and services.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

‘Another internet is possible’: Norway rails against ‘enshittification’

Open Media Network Site CMSs

Fabio Manganniello has:

Madblog: A Markdown Folder That Federates Everywhere

Federated Replies and Reactions in Madblog

Very cool.

WordPress

Matt Mullenweg envisions:

WordPress Everywhere

Your product is getting too complicated for that Matty.

WordPress.org has:

Your Browser Becomes Your WordPress

WordPress 7.0 Beta 5

The Repository has:

WordPress Launches Playground-Powered Personal Workspace, but Reception Is Mixed

From Experimental Tool to AI Infrastructure: Adam Zieliński’s Vision for WordPress Playground in 2026

Also cool. Typo3 and Laravel even run in it.

We’re Building Google Docs Inside WordPress While the AI Opportunity Slips Away

Opinion piece.

Roots Launches WP Composer as Open Source Alternative to WPackagist

WordPress 7.0’s Real-Time Collaboration Heads Into RC1 With Key Questions Still Open

Make WordPress has:

WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1 delayed

I guess the questions are still open.

What’s new in Gutenberg 22.7?

Block Visibility in WordPress 7.0

Pattern Editing in WordPress 7.0

Interesting.

Pseudo-element support for blocks and their variations in theme.json

Developer WordPress shares:

What’s new for developers? (March 2026)

Asia WordPress explores:

5 Reasons Designers Should Not Miss WCAsia 2026

WordPress.com announces:

WordPress Studio: New Debugging Tools for Local Development

Eve:

Built a thing: Crosspost to Inkwell — submitted to WordPress.org today

Projects like this are exactly what we are encouraging here on The Fulcrum.

Drupal CMS

Drupal Odyssey shares:

SVG Is Just Markup: Building a Dynamic Badge Graphic Entirely in Drupal's Theme Layer

Nice.

Matt Glaman announces:

Understanding Drupal: A Complete Guide to Caching Layers is now published!

His books are useful.

Build Awesome

11tyCMS announces:

11tyCMS Beta 2: New logo, major bug fixes, improved UX/UI and more!

This looks promising.

Juha-Matti Santala shares:

Markdown content split to sections in Eleventy and Nunjucks

Micro.blog

MicroBlog announces:

Inkwell for Mac

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Fabio Manganiello examines:

The local tech neighbourhood

This is a fantastic idea that fits perfectly within the Techno Anarchism and Open Media Network projects.

Framablog has:

La Suite numérique de l’État : critique des critiques

Numérique : l’alternative ne viendra pas d’un champion européen, mais des communs

Tuta asks:

What is digital sovereignty – and how Microsoft sparked the trend.

Nextcloud looks at:

The problems with Big Tech AI data collection: privacy concerns and how to protect your data

Kagi explains:

Why OSINT professionals recommend Kagi

Chat

Signal has:

Signal is working on an archive feature for Stories

Label yourself

Browsers

It's FOSS

Not a Firefox Fork! Kagi's Orion Browser Arrives on Linux as a Public Beta

Waterfox releases:

1.2.1 - Stability and cleanup

Writing

9to5 Linux reports:

Sigil 2.7.5 Open-Source EPUB Ebook Editor Is Out with New Features and Bug Fixes

Joplin shares:

Collapsible Sections

LibreOffice reports:

Germany’s Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards

Creative

GIMP announces:

GIMP 3.2 Released

Linux

It's FOSS reports:

GNOME 50 is Here, and X11 is Finally Gone

Postmarket OS has:

Financial update: 2025 financial report and new budget

New postmarketOS installations for the PinePhone use the wrong UCM configs

pmaports and pmbootstrap default branch changed

F-Droid explores:

Normalizing app store choice

This week's featured OMN tool

Sigil

As noted above Sigil is an Epub E-book editor.

Sigil

OMN Programming

Hamish Campbell explores:

The Tech “Empiricism” Problem

It was inspired by this from Dead Simple Tech:

Tech's empiricism problem

The Register reports:

Linux Foundation kicks off effort to shield FOSS maintainers from AI slop bug reports

Node.JS explains:

Evolving the Node.js Release Schedule

XWIKI has:

Europe's open-source infrastructure gap and how to fix it

January and February Pro Apps updates

Markdown

Interconnected examines:

mist: Share and edit Markdown together, quickly

KDE Blogs announces:

Marknote 1.5

HTML

Micah Torcellini looks at a:

Simple Pure CSS/HTML Timeline (with Extra Eleventy Integration)

HTMX

HashBangCode explores:

Drupal 11: Making Interactive Elements With HTMX

Twig

Symfony announces:

Twig 3.24.0 released

CSS

Always Twisted examines:

Un-Sass'ing My CSS: Colour Functions Without Sass

Frontend Master has:

Flexbox Masonry Layout (Explained with Math)

Web Components

And:

Form-Associated Custom Elements in Practice

JavaScript

Bloomberg looks at:

Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript

And Smashing Magazine has:

Moving From Moment.js To The JS Temporal API

CSS Tricks explores:

JavaScript for Everyone: Destructuring

This is one of the things I hated in developer bootcamp.

AI

Dries Buyeaert says:

Never submit code you don't understand

Other

OpenProject announces:

OpenProject 17.2.2

This week's featured programming tool

OpenProject

OpenProject is open source project management software.

OpenProject

ActivityPub

Emelia Smith explains:

How Standards Are Made

The Social Web Foundation has:

ap, the ActivityPub API command-line client

Introducing tags.pub

Bruno Rocha show us how to:

Deploy your own Fediverse instance with Snac

Interesting.

Self-Hosting compares:

Friendica vs Mastodon: Which Fediverse Platform?

Fabio Manganiello announces:

Support for Mastodon’s Consent-Respecting Quote Posts (FEP-044f) may finally land in Akkoma

Terence Eden shares:

Some updates to ActivityBot

And Chao-c' shares a:

Mastodon boost/fav/reply #bookmarklet idea

Michael Thomas looks at:

Self-Hosting Mastodon Behind Cloudflare Tunnel

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

ap

ap is an ActivityPub cli tool that could be useful for testing.

activitypub-cli 0.5.1

Fediverse

Hamish Campbell shares:

A note on the current voices speaking for the Fediverse

Jaz Michael King explains:

There Are a Million Fediverses, and They’re All Regulated

Elena Rossini opines:

Openness, transparency and reach: three reasons why public institutions should embrace the Fediverse

One of the O.Gs, Hubzilla announces:

Hubzilla 11.2RC Released!

Peertube announces:

PeerTube v8.1 is out!

Mastodon has its:

Trunk & Tidbits, February 2026

On a related note:

This is a good resource

NodeBB announces:

ActivityPub user and category outboxes coming soon

And Holos announces:

Release 1.0.0-rc-5

Bonfire

Finally, Bonfire Networks announces:

Bonfire 1.0.2: Shaping Your Space

Tres, tres bon. Now that I have settled in France I will begin experimenting with my test instance.

Elixir explores:

Lazy BDDs with eager literal differences

Connected Places shares some hard thinking in:

The Purpose of Protocols

RSS

FeedGrab announces:

A new way to discover feeds

P2P

Teaching the Web New Tricks explores:

Distributed Web Apps

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

ATProto Community has:

AHOY! 2025 - Anirudh Oppiliappan demonstrates Tangled on ATprotocol

Connected Places published:

FR157 – Social Software Distribution

TechCrunch reports:

Bluesky announces $100M Series B after CEO transition

This should fast track the enshittification. The mofos hid this news for a year.

Ben Werdmuller is:

Coming Off the Bench for Bluesky

Meanwhile, I am wanting ATproto to succeed, not Bluesky.

Speaking of, Eurosky has:

A Eurosky Account is just the start

I set up my Eurosky at @thefulcrum.eurosky this week. So, be sure to follow us there if you prefer ATProto to ActivityPub.

Eurosky Feature Requests

Igalia announces:

Advancing the AT Protocol in Partnership with Eurosky

Good news.

Daniel Holms examines:

Permissioned Data Interlude: Spaces

Democracy Tech

Decidim reports:

Decidim arrives in Mozambique

The Free Knowledge Institute has:

Democratic Technology: Building Alternatives to Techno-Authoritarianism

There are some fantastic references in this extensive article.

eMail / Newsletters

Buttondown explains:

How we enabled Content Security Policy for everyone

Magic Pages announces you can:

Send Newsletters From Your Actual Domain

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

SHARE COMPONENT

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 06 March, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:08:54 +0000

This post was originally on The Fulcrum.

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

We are taking next week off, so we’ll see you on the 20th.

Featured Item(s)

Euronews reports:

Europe unites to build sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure to stop reliance on US

The keyword to note here is federation.

Open Media Network Site CMSs

Ghost shares:

Rekindling your writing

FAIR has:

Second star to the right and straight on till morning…

Eleventy is becoming Build Awesome:

Build Awesome

Looks promising.

WordPress

Make WordPress has:

Call for Testing – Pattern editing and content-only interactivity in WordPress 7.0

Iframed Editor Changes in WordPress 7.0

What’s new in Gutenberg 22.6? (25 February)

Month in Test: March 3, 2026

WordPress has a great case study:

Grist

Human Made shows us:

How WordPress solves visual editing without the complexity tax

The Repository opines:

WordPress Faces an Event Horizon, Not a Sunset

Unfortunately, WordPress and Drupal are too big not to integrate with AI. At least it is opt in (for now).

Delicious Brains explores:

Database Indexing: The Missing Manual for WordPress

Learn WP Theme Dev has:

Building a Custom Block Part 8: Restricting Inner Blocks

Building a Custom Block Part 9: Adding Block Toolbar Controls

Gutenberg Times examines:

14 ways to add Custom CSS in WordPress Block Editor

Good overview of overly complex system.

Haurand has:

Seitenleiste bei Block Themes

Danny van Kooten looks at:

Using phpactor as a language server for WordPress development

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Improved editor for welcome emails

Spectral Web Services has:

Customizing theme text in Ghost

Ghost Pro broke my embeds

Drupal CMS

Drupal Odyssey continues a series:

The Automated Librarian: Part 6 - Building a System That Feeds Itself

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

The Guardian says:

Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more

9to5Linux reports:

Calibre 9.4 Adds “Reading Stats” to the E-Book Viewer to Show Reading Progress

F-Droid shares:

This Week in F-Droid

The NLnet Foundation has:

44 Digital Commons Projects Selected for NGI Zero Grants

Dual SIM for Mobile Linux

This an exciting one along with ActivityPub for Drupal.

Chat

Signal has:

Signal introduces member labels for groups

Signal brings sending view-once photos and videos to Signal Desktop

Browsers

Servo has an update:

January in Servo: preloads, better forms, details styling, and more!

I feel this has advanced enough that I can start experimenting with it. Great progress!

Cloud

Nextcloud has a video:

Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter design update. 🎨 QR code login, intuitive icons, enhanced filters, and more!

Techzine reports:

Nextcloud doubles down on sovereign message with latest release

Creative

GIMP announces:

GIMP 3.2 RC3: Third Release Candidate for GIMP 3.2

Inkscape has:

Inkscape is hiring: Developers and Administrator (2026)

Linux

Tinker says:

In prep for the Windows 12 rollout, get ready for your town's Linux Install Parties

Modal shares:

Towards a Sovereign Mobile Stack

This looks fucking awesome.

And this seems like the closest phone (now available) to what Modal envisions.

FLX1s

Convergence Hub

Use this to turn it into a desktop or server. 🤯

PostmarketOS announces:

postmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels

Motorola has:

Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation, marking a new chapter in smartphone security and expanding its enterprise portfolio

Hosting / Serving

SecureDrop asks:

Help us test WEBCAT alpha

This week's featured OMN tool

Bunny Fonts

Push your privacy to the next level. Prevent your users from being tracked by 3rd party websites and simplify GDPR compliance.

Bunny Fonts

OMN Programming

Smashing Frames has:

Artisanal care

Ben Werdmueller asks:

Can we build the dog?

The Register reports:

Open source devs consider making digital hogs pay for every Git pull

Markdown

David Duymelinck asks:

Markdown pages, are they a good solution?

HTML

And CSS Tricks asks:

Popover API or Dialog API: Which to Choose?

CSS

They also share:

Yet Another Way to Center an (Absolute) Element

Useful and easier.

The Different Ways to Select < html > in CSS

Frontend Masters shares:

The Odometer Effect (without JavaScript)

The Big Gotcha of Anchor Positioning

Web Components

And:

Post Mortem: Rewriting AgnosticUI with Lit Web Components

JavaScript

AI

Other

XWIKI has:

Building a knowledge base that lasts: How to structure, maintain, and scale documentation

Redefining enterprise collaboration with open-source solutions: XWiki and Spectrum Groupe

Clemi Potiers explores:

EMI et Forge : les indispensables!

This week's featured programming tool

ATProto

The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications.

ATProto

ActivityPub

ActivityPub for WordPress shares:

8.0.0 — Smash That Like Button

Terence Eden examines:

Adding "Log In With Mastodon" to Auth0

Very cool.

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Emissary

Emissary is a Fedi server built for end users, developers, and admins.

Emissary

Fediverse

Matt Duggan says:

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

Fediforum shares:

Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop 2026/03/02

My Bad Take Space expounds:

On Meeting Users Where They Are

Maho Pacheco is working on:

A Fediverse linktree

Connected Places has:

FR155 – Where Does Community Live – updates

FR156 – Share Where?

Roberta Fidora reports:

Animation Array is a new animation programme on The Indie Beat Television

HolosSocial has:

The next Holos release will use Bloom filters

What if every phone could contribute to the #Fediverse, not just consume it?

In the next #Holos release: post expiration

Mastodon announces:

A new Share button

Bonfire

Elixir (the language used to build Bonfire) explores:

Lazy BDDs with eager literal intersections

POST AS HTML
Back to top 👆🏼

Ricardo Mendes takes a:

Deep Dive into Wafrn: How One Platform Self-Hosts Both ActivityPub and Bluesky Identities

Very, very cool.

The European Commission announces:

Commission registers European Citizens' Initiative calling for a European social media platform

Hmmm.

RSS

NetNetNewswire says:

Testing help for NetNewsWire 7.0.1 beta needed — runs on macOS 15

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Blacksy announces:

The blacksky.community web application now uses our own API servers to load posts, timelines and profiles

Rish explores:

Living Documents on the Feed

Daniel has:

Permissioned Data Diary 2: Buckets

Blaine says:

atproto, meet alf

pckt shares:

Building Our Corner of the Open Social Web: pckt.cafe and More

From WhiteWind to pckt.blog in Just One Click

If you have the misfortune to be on the non-maintained Whitewind plaform you can migrate to pckt.

EuroskySocial announces:

You can now use our new tool EU-HAUL

I guess this moves you from Bluesky to Eurosky. That would be fantastic.

Tyler Fisher shows us how to:

Sync your WordPress posts to standard.site records on your PDS

Introducing Wireservice

In a few weeks I think will get a Eurosky account and connect it to the Fulcrum backup site. And start cross-posting from there. And maybe to pckt as well.

I have to admit ATProto is coming into its own. But Bluesky is still 100% doomed to enshittification. It's not the code. It's the company.

eMail / Newsletters

Tuta has:

Blocking Gmail ads is possible! Here's how in 2026.

Buttondown shares:

Filter sent emails by engagement rate

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

This is http so you may get a browser warning.

Previous Symfony Station Posts

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 27 February, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 13:47:25 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

There were two great articles this week and I will quote extensively from both.

TechPolicy Press writes:

AI technology is advancing. Anyone thinking critically about large language models and their impact on society now faces a more complex challenge: the agentic turn.

We can oppose large language models on grounds well beyond claims of uselessness. We might examine the AI industry’s political power, its pattern of sloppy deployment based on hype, the dangers of surveillance, the original sin of inhumane data extraction, or in-built biases such as misogyny and racism. It is tempting to add: “and it doesn’t even work!” Online, critics circulate memes of language model mistakes that are good for a laugh and solidarity, but must not be mistaken for users' everyday experiences.

What remains urgently in dispute are the boundaries of utility: what usefulness means, for whom, and under what conditions? At what cost and from whom are benefits derived, and how are benefits and risks distributed? What decisions are quietly removed from public deliberation and handed to automated systems controlled by corporations, governments, and other institutions? That people are using language models doesn’t make criticism of them irrelevant. It makes it urgent.

Stochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI

Ben Werdmuller explains why AI coding can now be useful:

Good vibes, bad vendors

AI has NOT stopped sucking, it's just getting more complex and harder to access whether it's fucked up in terms of useful vs non-usefulness. And it takes a senior engineer to use it properly. More importantly, it will always be amoral and used immorally 95% of the time. There is more on this below in our programming section.

Hamish Campbell writes:

Scale changes everything as human behavior does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signaling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.

But when those same instincts operate at contemporary social scale, inside complex technological societies, like the current NGO-oriented Fediverse, they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them. What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into the extraction and enclosure we start to see now. This is not a moral failure of the human species, it is a predictable outcome of scale.

NLnet and the geekproblem as well as NGO dynamics tend to operate with a narrow philosophy of fund discrete, bounded technical projects that avoid any political positioning to prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments). This creates structural friction because as infrastructure projects for grassroots media and social organising doesn’t fit neat grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native radical or openly political framing scares institutional funders.

So we reinforce a path where money exists, but it flows toward the wrong layers for movement-building. So when does this balance change? This is the hard truth: systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when people push parallel practices that make the gap obvious.

The uncomfortable reality we need to compost is the current institutional layer probably thinks they are solving the resource problem – just at a different level (protocol legitimacy, policy access, etc.). So the conflict isn’t only “they are wrong” but they are solving a different problem than the one native actors see as urgent.

The core dynamic that is hidden is most people assume power = foundations or organisations. Where the reality is power = maintainers + large instances + narratives + funding gravity. Formal structures, and the little native governance we have mostly follow these forces, and do not in any way balance them.

Grassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.

Where institutional actors see chaos without coordination and feel deep psychological and self serving needs… to stabilise. Both misidentify where decisions actually originate. The deepest unspoken divide is people are defending different emotional survival strategies. Until this is recognised discussions (will) loop endlessly.

The tension that’s pushed back into the Fediverse the last few years

So build the things you need on top of ActivityPub but be ready to fork it, bridge it, or pull out the components you need if the protocol enshittifies. Build for Fediverse clients and your communities.

To use a Taoist metaphor, if the platform or protocol is a stone in a stream and you are water, flow around or over it. Don't butt your head against it until you get frustrated and quit.

And build bridges to CMSs, email, RSS, Non-Bluesky ATProto, Matrix, P2P, Solid Pods, etc. etc. as well.

In other words build useful tools not platforms or even protocols.

OMN shares a vision of how this can work:

A Minimal, Governable Infrastructure for Trust-Based Media Flows

Open Media Network Site CMSs

NiemanLab reports:

Why “magic links” and passcodes are taking over news logins

WordPress

Netribution shares:

Mike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…

Joost de Valk has:

FAIR, WordPress, and Knowing When to Stop

Well, fuck. At least TYPO3 has taken it over.

Make WordPress examines:

What’s new in Gutenberg 22.6?

SVG icons! 🤸🏾‍♂️

WordPress Europe wants applications for the:

Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship

Hey WP Europe, get on the Fediverse. You literally have an official ActivityPub plugin for fucks sake.

The Repository reports:

WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 Ships After Delay as Project Leadership Realigns Release Around AI and Milestone Story

WP Accessibility Day Is Crowdfunding a Booth at WordCamp Europe to Close the EAA Knowledge Gap

WordPress Developer shows us:

How to add custom entries to the editor Preview dropdown

Carolina Nymark provides two new lessions:

Introduction to the Block Bindings API

Block Hooks API

DelicousBrains looks at:

Architecting Reliable Remote Requests with the HTTP API

Ghost

G. Casqueiro shares:

Why I Chose Ghost (And Why I Keep Choosing It)

John Odolon explores:

Open Source in the age of AI

Grassroots Economic Organizing

A Gourmet for the People

Drupal CMS

Drupal releases:

canvas 1.2.0

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Organic Maps shares its:

February 2026 Organic Maps update

Terence Eden examines:

Adding OpenStreetMap login to Auth0

F-Droid has:

Keep Android Open

Tor VPN Beta

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki says:

Open means open. Or it means nothing.

Browsers

9to5Linux reports:

Firefox 148 Is Now Available for Download with AI Kill Switch and Other Changes

My VPN is Mozilla and I use Firebird, but you should use Zen, Waterfox, or LibreWolf as your browser.

Speaking of, Waterfox announces:

6.6.9 - Security and stability improvements

Or go hardcore with Tor:

New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.7

Cloud

FOSS, Privacy en minder Big Tech looks at:

Nextcloud

Writing

LibreOffice announces:

LibreOffice Online: a fresh start

Creative

GIMP has an:

Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer

The Creative Independent shares:

Creativity as resistance

They have an interesting site design.

Linux

9to5 Linux reports:

Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 7.0 Release Candidate

Murena has:

Please welcome /e/OS 3.5!

Meet Murena Maps

Root looks at:

Sailfish OS na Sony Xperia 10 III: seznámení a instalace

This week's featured OMN tool

Raw Therapy

RawTherapee is a free, cross-platform raw image processing program.

Raw Therapy

OMN Programming

Tech Policy Press explores:

Internet Protocols, Power, and the Rebirth of the Border

This is why P2P bridging and interoperability are critical.

Joan Westenberg has:

The unbearable weight of cruft

I grew up on a farm and we called it cow and horse shit. Somebody had to shovel it out on a regular basis to have a beneficial barn.

Smashing Frames shares:

Acting ethically in an imperfect world

This caused quite a discussion.

My comment is a question. If a certain tech

was made by shits via shitty behavior,
and 95% of the use it is put to is shit,
and those uses are shit for the planet, humanity, and democracy,
and if 85% of the people using it are shits,

is it a shitty tech only shitty people would use?

Hmmm, anyway IMHO here's how to use AI if you have to (which usually you shouldn't).

Drupal Odyssey has this series:

The Automated Librarian: A Drupal 11 Data Discovery

This is a proper use case for AI that is executed properly.

Markdown

Joan Westenberg says:

The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.

David Duymelinck has:

The AI scraper problem and a possible fix

Are markdown files becoming the new dot files?

If you don't use AI coding you don't have these problems.

HTMX

HashBangCode refreshes:

A Look At HTMX With PHP

CSS

CSS Tricks has:

Loading Smarter: SVG vs. Raster Loaders in Modern Web Design

Making a Responsive Pyramidal Grid With Modern CSS

Overly complicated but interesting.

Dear Schepp explores:

Turning a CSS Carousel into a Theme Switcher

Ditto.

JavaScript

CSS Tricks shares:

A Complete Guide to Bookmarklets

This is the type of tool JavaScript should be used for.

AI

Lay Lavish shares:

uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

Other

Filippo Valsorda says:

Turn Dependabot Off

Fair enough, but I recommend turning off GitHub period and using Forgejo or migrating to Codeberg.

XWiki has new:

Internal documentation | Best practices and how to build it with XWiki

This week's featured programming tool

Platform 6

Platform 6 brings people and organisations together to design and build a co-operative future.

Platform 6

ActivityPub

Big news from We Distribute:

Federated End-to-End Encrypted Messaging is Coming Soon

Thrilled to see Bonfire working with Emissary on this effort.

Fedify examines:

Creating your own federated microblog

This is an interesting little project:

Robot.Villas

Castopod releases:

v1.15.0

EvilMartians look at:

Ruby on Whales: Dockerizing Ruby and Rails development

Hey Evils, since Mastodon is written with Ruby why don't you set up an instance.

ActivityPub.space explores:

Global tags and content discovery

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

I ran across this one this week.

rdf-pub - generic Activity-Pub Server

It's a possible solution to the JSON vs JSON-LD debate.

Fediverse

FediForum aggregrates:

Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop submissions summary

Connected Places shares:

FR154 – Search and Community

FediLab announces:

The results are in: the community wants HolosDiscover back

Holos Social announces:

Holos 1.0.0-rc-3 has been published.

Frame Travel Roam Capture has:

One year on PixelFed: Reclaiming my Photography on the Algoritm

Mastodon announces:

v4.5.7

Matthias Scharwies explores less well known Fediverse platforms:

Everyone is a publisher!

GoToSocial announces:

Version 0.21.0 of #GoToSocial, aka Sacrilegious Sloth, has emerged from the release candidate process

Gonzalo Nemmi reports:

Console based XMPP client, Profanity version 0.16.0, has just been released

Gajim announces:

Gajim 2.4.4

P2P

Zoron reannounces:

Signal Protocol for a P2P Webapp

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Paul Frazee looks at:

Practical Decentralization

Kevin Åberg Kultalahti says:

Be Wary of Bluesky

Yep.

ATProto Community has:

AHOY! 2025 - Samuel Newman with How we added video to Bluesky

Democracy Tech

The Free Knowledge Institute announces:

We’re building up the Democratic Tech Fund.

We're creating cooperative alternatives to surveillance capitalism and tech monopolies.

Please make a donation at the open collective link above. I just set up a recurring monthly one.

eMail / Newsletters

Buttondown introduces:

Custom click tracking domains

9to5 Linux reports:

Thunderbird 148 Email Client Improves Accessibility in Various Tree Views

Tuta announces:

Email on your terms with Schedule Send in Tuta Mail!

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 20 February, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:51:27 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

Ben Werdmuller writes:

There are billions of people who are not well served by the existing social web, particularly in global majority countries. Open social web protocols have the potential to allow them to not just build communities that better address their needs, with features and cultural assumptions that veer far from US and European norms, but to own them.

These aren’t communities that need to be spoken down to or harvested by American projects and non-profits; they haven’t been spoken to at all, except as communities to strip-mine by companies like Meta.

They need to be first-party participants in the communities that are building the open social web.

Growing the open social web

This is why I say build something for a community you are in each week. And please help those who are less fortunate when asked.

Island in the Net writes:

The indie web did not originate as a protest movement. It emerged from a set of constructive, generative ideas about what individuals could do with the web: own your content, control your identity, publish on your own terms, connect with others without intermediaries deciding the terms of engagement.

These are the principles that drove the creation of IndieWebCamp, the development of standards like Webmention and Micropub, and the quiet, persistent work of thousands of people building personal sites and tooling to support them.

The Indie Web Is Not Defined by Its Enemies

Never the less, it is one of the corporate web's enemies.

As Wakest notes on another one:

The fediverse is anti-capitalist. The fediverse is anarchist praxis. The fediverse is not a protocol. The fediverse caries an ideology of communal care and mutual aid for our fellow humans.

Their take

Open Media Network Site CMSs

WordPress

Make WordPress has:

Help Test WordPress 7.0

Developer WordPress has:

What’s new for developers? (February 2026)

WebDev shares:

Beyond the Quick Fix: Navigating the 5 Most Common WordPress Errors

attoWP has:

WordPress Full Site Editing (FSE): Complete Guide 2026

Learn WP Theme Dev looks at:

Building a Custom Block Part 7: Styling Inner Blocks

The Repository reports:

The WP Community Collective Expands Board, Chris Reynolds Named Interim President

Ghost

Magic Pages answers:

Can I Use Cloudflare's Proxy (Orange Cloud) With Magic Pages?

Drupal CMS

Optasy explores:

Why Drupal CMS 2.0.0 Is a Revolutionary Leap Forward in Content Management

Vardot explains:

Varbase + Drupal CMS 2.0: Enterprise-Ready from Day One

Dripyard announces:

Dripyard's Meridian + Drupal CMS Webinar Recording is Up

Drupal founder, Dries Buyaert shares an easy way to follow Drupal CMS dev efforts:

A better way to follow Drupal development

For example:

Create a 'Blank' template option for users who want to start from scratch

You can experiment with Drupal here:

Drupal CMS

If you select the Byte option (which you should do if experimenting), be patient. It takes a while to install.

Write.as

WriteAs asks:

Ever publish a post with the wrong font set on your post?

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Wired reports:

How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance

9to5 Linux reports:

Calibre 9.0 Open-Source Ebook Manager Released with New Bookshelf View

Chat

Signal announces:

Signal is working on the ability for admins to delete messages from other group members

Signal launches version 8.0 with Signal Secure Backups

Browsers

Librewolf announces:

LibreWolf bsys6 Release v147.0.4-1

Waterfox has:

1.2.0 - A stronger foundation

Mozilla Hacks examines:

Launching Interop 2026

Cloud

Nextcloud shares:

Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter: Reclaim your digital autonomy

Writing

Real Linux User asks:

Is Linux a suitable platform for writers?

A great list of tools. Many of which we use or have featured here. novelWriter is a new one I will check out.

LibreOffice celebrates:

The 14th Anniversary of Our Foundation

9to5 Linux reports:

LibreOffice 25.8.5 Is Now Available for Download with More Than 60 Bug Fixes

Linux

KDE looks at:

Plasma 6.6: A visual guide to the best desktop in the known universe (according to us)

AsteroidOS announces:

AsteroidOS 2.0 Released

Hosting / Serving

Elena Rossini continues a series:

A newbie's guide to self-hosting with YunoHost. Part 4: backups

Chronicle of Weird Things announces:

Only Junk Fans

This week's featured OMN tool

Delta Chat

Delta Chat is a decentralized and secure messenger app.

POST AS HTML

OMN Programming

Mark Nottingham explores:

The Power of 'NO' In Internet Standards

Open Web Docs shares:

Open Web Docs Impact and Transparency Report 2025

If you wanted to move from Meetup.com to Mobilizon (and you should), Hash Bang Code shows you how to get your old data:

Leaving Meetup.com And Extracting Past Event Data Without API Access

Pulsar announces:

Pulsar v1.131.0: A Valentine's Day & Electron 30 Edition

DDEV announces:

DDEV 1.25.0 is here

XWiki reviews:

XWiki at FOSDEM 2026

HTML

Frontend Masters looks at:

Performance-Optimized Video Embeds with Zero JavaScript

Fantastic.

Picalilli says:

You might not need role="presentation"

HTMX

SoftwareSeni explores:

The HTMX Renaissance—Rethinking Web Architecture for 2026

CSS

Always Twisted examines:

Style Headings using the CSS :heading pseudo-class

This will be quite useful when it becomes standard.

JavaScript

ESLint announces:

ESLint v10.0.0 released

I missed this a few weeks ago.

AI

The Guardian reports:

How the anxiety over AI could fuel a new workers’ movement

Thank the gods I'm retired. But if you aren't, you might want to work somewhere that has a union.

Dapdip, an "AI" journalist decided something I wrote (a good while back) was "breaking news". 🤨

Techno Anarchism: A Global Movement Against Big Tech

It stole the image from https://www.technoanarchism.org/.

Here's my original piece. 😈

Baldur Bjarnason asks:

Have I hardened against LLMs?

Other

Joan Westenberg looks at AI PR slop:

The Case for Gatekeeping, or Why Medieval Guilds had it figured out

Codeberg announces:

Codeberg Pages is currently migrating from the legacy v2 codebase to the newer git-pages codebase

Phoronix reports:

Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot

This week's featured programming tool

Pulsar

Pulsar is a community-led, hyper-hackable text editor.

And it's the one I use.

ActivityPub

Neon Blue Demon Wyrm says:

ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation

Kopper shows us:

How to not regret c2s

I reran across a service this week:

Badgefed: Empower Your Community with Digital Badges

Ricardo Mendes has:

Hacking on Indiekit to customize my blog

Deploying Your Own IndieWeb Site with Indiekit + Eleventy (Docker Compose based)

Tres cool. Mais non simple.

Social Coding celebrates:

ActivityPub Social API is getting a lot of attention

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

ActivityPods

ActivityPods brings together two game-changing technologies, ActivityPub and Solid Pods, and empowers developers to create truly decentralized applications.

POST AS HTML

Fediverse

The Social Web Foundation looks at:

Growing the Social Web

Media Industry Shift explores:

Open Protocols (and Why Size Matters) in Publishing

Small and local are good.

Using Substack as your web home isn't.

Open Media Network examines:

The twitter migration, signal vs noise, and rebuilding openweb culture

Connected Places asks:

FR153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

Where Does Community Live?

Great food for thought.

Sean Tilley has a great thread:

I think the ActivityPub client-to-server API is extremely important and underrated.

And article:

Reimagining Fediverse Advocacy

KISS. Which is why I am interested in Bonfire, an all in one solution for existing communities.

Holos has:

Implementing interaction controls in Holos

Relays are dumb by design: your identity and data belong to you, not to the relay.

A YunoHost package for Holos Social relay server is underway!

GoToSocial announces:

The second release candidate for #GoToSocial v0.21.0 Sacrilegious Sloth!

Mastodon has:

Connecting the world through thriving online communities

Our technical direction

Mastodon is for the people

Contiuwuation announces:

Continuwuity 0.5.5

Matrix shares an:

Analysis of reported issues in vodozemac

RSS

Mike Hindle is:

Introducing RSS

Please provide RSS for your sites. Even if you’re 27 years late to the party.

Ranchero shares:

Stress-free RSS reader FeedCity debuted last year

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Ben Werdmuller shares:

Building trust in the open

BTW, he notes: "There is a difference between news and journalism. The first is information, and the second is context." This is important because news is a commodity (especially in this shit AI era) but journalism is not.

Stefan Bohacek has a:

Bridgy Fed bookmarklet for Mastodon

Democracy Tech

The Institute of Development Studies explores:

Voice or Chatter? Case Studies: decidim.barcelona, Spain

Dweb announces:

We are supporting the creation of the Democratic Tech Fund!

eMail / Newsletters

Tuta announces:

Tuta Mail and Tuta Calendar now available as Thunderbird add-ons

Buttondown announces:

Revamped replies

Ghost introduces:

Inbox Links

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 13 February, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:12:20 +0000

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

Hamish Campbell writes:

What can grassroots openweb people actually do when the EU is building alternatives to dotcons, but with very real risks of recreating European versions of the same problems?

This is a historic moment, for the first time in decades public funding is flowing toward digital commons and infrastructure sovereignty is being taken seriously.

But alongside this opportunity comes an obvious risk, that they replace Californian platform capitalism with European platform capitalism.

The EU opportunity and danger, what grassroots projects can offer

And he has this as one option:

An affinity group is not just “a group of people who agree”

Good Internet Magazine shares:

One could argue that the modern web has become a Rube Goldberg machine of sorts, where instead of deliberate inefficiency, it has been inflicted accidentally.

Pointless bloat brought on by tracking scripts, analytics, and optimization tools that serve no real purpose to the user and even prove disruptive to the provider in some cases. In the unrelenting pursuit of maximum efficiency and conversion, we've created the most inefficient systems imaginable.

In spite of this, there is a counter-movement of sorts. Digital creators embracing the philosophy of Harold Harold and building websites that serve no corporate purpose. People creating interactive experiences that generate no revenue and crafting digital art that exists purely for the joy of creation and discovery.

Rebelling against efficiency

Be sure to buy an edition from them. And join the OMN with a useful or unuseful website.

Open Media Network Site CMSs

Simon Repp shares:

Another early Faircamp 2.0 teaser

WordPress

Make WordPress has:

What’s new in Gutenberg 22.5? (04 February)

WordPress Playground has:

wp-env now runs WordPress with Playground runtime

This is simpler for simpler sites.

Groundworx explains:

Why I Choose Gutenberg Over Elementor

The Repository reports:

WordPress Meetup Organizers Back Revamp Plans, but Warn Infrastructure Must Catch Up

WordPress AI Client Proposal Prompts Debate Ahead of Planned Core Merge in 7.0

Well, fuck.

Mullenweg Calls for Markdown Endpoints on WordPress.org as He Pushes “Web OS” Vision

Matt Mullenweg: Global Sponsors’ Products Should Be “Fair Game” For WordCamp Talks

More on Automattic's enshitification.

Learn WP Theme Dev continues a series:

Building a Custom Block Part 5: Adding Block Styles

Delicious Brains explores:

The Art of the WordPress Transient: Performance, Persistence, and Database Bloat

WP Editor and Blocks examines:

Client-Side Navigation with the Interactivity API Router

Ghost

Ghost has:

Comment moderation

Micro.blog

Micro announces an:

Updated text editor with full-screen mode and editing improvements

Write.as

Write.as announces:

Post previews are here!

Introducing Write.as Memberships

If you are interested, now would be a good time to commit for $3 a month. See below.

Celebrating 11 Years on the Web!

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Picalilli shares:

The open source design stack

Some good stuff here.

Murena announces:

Meet Murena Maps

Chat

Signal has:

New Signal updates for Android, iOS, and Desktop bring mostly behind-the-scenes improvements

Signal raises limit for audio and video calls to 75 participants

Browsers

FOSS Force says:

Get Your Zen on With Zen Browser

Fair warning, you might want to view this in reader mode.

Igalia has:

Interop 2026 Focus Areas Announced

Cloud

Nextcloud has:

February maintenance updates before Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter release

Writing

Joplin announces:

Joplin will come preloaded on the HMD Terra M

Creative

Linuxiac reports:

GIMP 3.0.8 Delivers Bug Fixes Across Core, Tools, and Plugins

KdenLive shares:

Parametrized Keyframes - Status Report, February 2026

Linux

Igalia reports:

Linux 6.19 Released

TecMint lists:

10 Tools to Make Bootable USB Drive from ISO in 2026

We all know Linux is a pain in the ass to install. But, here are some tools to help.

LineageOS announces:

Linux 6.19 Released

Dominik Chrastecky shares:

Patch what Android thinks is the installer of the given app

This week's featured OMN tool

Publii

Our retirement site, Les Chroniques de Walker is built with Publii. I've grown to like it.

With the Publii app, you can create a beautiful, safe, and privacy-friendly website.

Publii

OMN Programming

Good Internet Magazine looks at:

Unlocking a better future with old computers

Seth Larson shows us:

How to disable Copilot in GitHub?

Better yet, don’t use GitHub.

Mark Sample announces:

Here's Glitchlet

HTMX

OpenRelay explores:

Building Infinite Scroll with HTMX

CSS

Always Twisted examines:

Underlining Links With CSS

A good review.

Frontend Masters has:

Background Patterns with CSS corner-radius

An Over-The-Top Spoiler Design with the Details Element

Web Components

Igalia looks at:

Reference Target: having your encapsulation and eating it too

JavaScript

Roberto Butti reviews:

State of JS 2025: Popular Syntax Features Explained with PHP Equivalents

David Duymelinck says:

Javascript has a Typescript problem

AI

Local Ghost says to:

Stop generating, start thinking

Other

Larvitz Blog reports:

Podman 5.8: Quadlet Multi-File Install, Automatic SQLite Migration, and the Road to 6.0

This week's featured programming tool

Penpot

Penpot is the web-based open-source design tool that bridges the gap between designers and developers.

Penpot

ActivityPub

ActivityPub Space shares:

ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce forum

ActivityPub for WordPress announces its:

Roadmap 2026 — Charting the stars of the open social web

Great stuff coming. I wish I could say the same for Ghost.

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

ActivityPub Rocks

This site is maintained by the current steward of the ActivityPub stack of standards.

ActivityPub Rocks

Fediverse

I ran across this tool:

Thread Reader

Holos has:

Deeply mixed feelings about #ActivityPub's adoption of JSON-LD

Holos 1.0.0-rc-2 has been published

Connected Places has:

FR152 – The DSA Needs Big Tech

ToToSocial announces:

v0.21.0-rc1 Sacrilegious Sloth

Mastodon has:

Trunk & Tidbits, January 2026

FOSDEM 2026 Recap

Thankfully Mastodon has picked up its game in the last year.

Stefan Bohacek created a:

Bridgy Fed bookmarklet for Mastodon

The Register reports:

Matrix is quietly becoming the chat layer for governments chasing digital sovereignty

Fabio Manganiello prepares:

Webmentions with batteries included

Absolutely awesome.

RSS

NetNewWire reports:

NetNewsWire 7.0 for iOS

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Roost announces:

Meet Coop V.0

A New Social announces:

Launch: Interact with Unbridged Replies & Mentions

eMail / Newsletters

Tuta shows us:

How to disable Gemini on Android, Gmail, Chrome, Photos, & Google apps. Opt out of AI tracking now!

Ghost updates:

Welcome emails

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 06 February, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:13:45 +0000

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

This what I mean when I encourage you to join the Open Media Network. 😈

Melanie Cat purrs:

Oh nice social media account, did your Zuckerberg give it to you? Aww, how cute. Now grow the fuck up and get your own fucking website.

Make a Fucking Website

I am pretty sure she is a black cat. IYKYK 🐈‍⬛

Open Media Network Site CMSs

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki looks at:

The Weight of the Good Days

We love you Jannis. Keep at it.

TechDirt reports:

Whoops, Websites Realize That Killing Their Comment Sections Was A Mistake

WordPress

Make WordPress has:

WordPress 6.9.1 RC1 is now available

Call for Testing – Customizable Navigation (“Mobile”) Overlays

Anne McCarthy is:

Exploring work in progress for WordPress 7.0

HeroPress explains:

How Art School Led Me To Web Design

Great DIY story.

FAIR shares its:

2025 FAIR Recap

Varun Dubey explores:

Gutenberg Blocks in 2026: WordPress Development in the AI Era

The Repository reports:

WP Engine Launches Newsroom, a Publishing Platform Built on Big Bite’s Newsroom Expertise

Ghost

Magic Pages shares a:

Post-Mortem on 29 January 2026 Outage

Drupal CMS

Drupal has:

Inside Drupal CMS 2.0: Q&A with Product Owner Pam Barone

Drupalize Me announces:

Release Day: The Drupal Recipes API

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Hamish Campbell examines:

The uncomfortable path

Collabra announces:

A Faster Friendlier Collabora Online – Part III

Rebel Tech Alliance looks at:

The Big Tech Walkout 2026

Framasoft has:

Retravaillez vos PDFs sans crainte

Chat

Signal announces:

Signal Desktop now available in the Microsoft Store

Zulip announces:

Zulip Server 11.5 security release

Browsers

Adam Varn says:

I just want a browser

TechCrunch reports:

Firefox will soon let you block all of of its generative AI features

Or better yet, use Zen, LibreWolf, or Waterfox.

Speaking of, LibreWolf announces:

LibreWolf bsys6 Release v147.0.3-2

Cloud

Nextcloud has:

Top 10 easy sharing tips with your SharePoint alternative: Nextcloud Files

A new data access architecture for Nextcloud: introducing the ADA engine

Nextcloud recognized as a Digital Public Good

Writing

LibreOffice announces:

LibreOffice 26.2 is here: a faster, more polished office suite that you control

I put this here because they have improved markdown support, which is great.

Creative

Linuxiac reports:

Kdenlive 25.12.1 Brings Welcome Screen Polishing and Audio Fixes

Linux

The Linux Foundation Europe shares:

Linux Foundation Europe 2025: Milestones, Momentum, and What’s Next

The Linux Journal looks:

Inside the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG): A New Layer of Kernel Integrity Protection

This week's featured OMN tool

Want to publish something like a fanzine? Check out Scribus:

Scribus is the go-to Libre Desktop Publishing Application.

Scribus

OMN Programming

Derick Rethans shares:

FOSDEM 2026 Reflections

404 Media reports:

Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue

HTML

Mike Matuzović has an:

Introduction to the new HTML element

Frontend Masters demonstrates:

Performance-Optimized Video Embeds with Zero JavaScript

CSS Tricks has:

I Learned The First Rule of ARIA the Hard Way

Evil Martians updates a classic:

How to Favicon in 2026: Three files that fit most needs

One to bookmark.

CSS

Smashing Magazine explores:

Unstacking CSS Stacking Contexts

Groundworx says:

Stop Fighting Your Layouts: The Real Power of CSS Grid

Web Components

Heydon Works shows us:

How To Dynamically Install Custom Elements

AI

Internet Exchange reports on:

Getting Bots to Respect Boundaries

Other

OpenProject shows us:

How to work with project templates

Linuxiac reports:

Forgejo 14.0 Arrives With New Web Editor, Smarter Search

DDEV announces:

Release Notes for XWiki 17.4.9

XWiki announces:

Release Notes for XWiki 17.4.9

This week's featured programming tool

HTML, master it.

HTML is for people

ActivityPub

ActivityPub for WordPress has:

7.9.0 — Spring Cleaning

Swentel works on the:

ActivityPub module for Drupal

NodeBB shares:

FEP-4f05: Soft Deletion

This is interesting.

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

ActivityPub Book

Written by Evan Prodromou, the coauthor of the ActivityPub protocol and the Activity Streams 2.0 data format, this is the ActivityPub handbook that every social software hacker needs.

I have it and am slowly reading it.

Fediverse

The Guardian shares:

How the left can win back the internet – and rise again

He's right about competition among the left, but perhaps this fucker has never heard of the Fediverse.

Hamish Campbell explains:

How our “mainstreaming” people understand what they’re doing

InterLedger announces:

Interledger Foundation awards $200,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media

Speaking of, the Social Web Foundation shares its:

EU Open Source Policy Feedback

Stefan Bohacek provides:

Fediverse: An overview for community organizers

IFTAS shares:

IFTAS Response to the European Commission’s Call for Evidence “Towards European open digital ecosystems”

Castopod is:

Introducing the Castopod Installation Script

Bonfire

Elixir has:

Type inference of all constructs and the next 15 months

This week's featured Fediverse Platform/Tool/Resource

There was a rare Castopod article so let's feature it.

Castopod is an open-source server made for podcasters who want engage and interact with their audience.

Castopod

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Blacksky announces:

Money for mutual resilience: Introducing Blacksky Cash

Stefan Bohacek reports:

Eurosky is making progress as they roll out their own PDS

Anuj Ahooja examines:

The Everything Account

eMail Newsletters

Tuta looks at:

DeGoogle list with best private alternatives | 2026

Buttondown announces:

Public descriptions for tags

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

TAM and OMN tools for potential Bonfire workflows

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:23:16 +0000

This article previously appeared on The Fulcrum.

Let's look at Techno Anarchist and Open Media Network tools that would boost efficiency and productivity in Bonfire workflows. And I will be paraphrasing heavily.

As mentioned in a previous TPF post, I plan to experiment with Bonfire and have taken notes for a series of articles.

This is the second one. The first is here if you inexplicably missed it. 😉

I have even reserved the domain manade.org to possibly run subdomains off of for various communities I am part of once I retire in France this spring. For now building a test instance is a priority.

And I have also built a new website for that project on the subdomain, http://site.manade.org. In fact it is so new, the hosting company still hasn't sorted the SSL certificate out. Hence the http. Sorry. 🤦🏽‍♂️

Anyway, while I explore the Bonfire documentation, I have concurrently been exploring and thinking about potential tools to use in building Bonfire communities.

And of course being who we are, they should be open source. And preferably based in the last bastion of democracy, the European Union.

So, let’s start a fire. 🔥

General Tools

Framatoolbox

Framasoft is one of several open source online services hosted with a strong commitment to the goal of decentralization.

So, using Framatoolbox is a big step on the road to your digital autonomy.

Framatoolbox is also a political proposal. It's exploring an alternative to surveillance capitalism by experimenting with the contribution society.

By offering uses, feedback and contributions to OmniTools ⬇️, Framasoft participates in maintaining a common resource.

OmniTools

You can boost your productivity with OmniTools. It's also the toolbox that make's you more efficient. Access thousands of user-friendly utilities to edit images, text, lists and data. And do so in your browser.

Image Tools
PDF Tools
Text Tools
JSON Tools
CSV Tools
XML Tools?

Vert

File Converter Tools

Vert's image, audio, and document processing is done on your device. Videos are converted on their servers. So, no file size limit, no ads, and completely open source.

Writing

Markdown

Markdown helps you write for your website content, programming documentation, wiki, and project management. You are probably familiar with it and it's becoming standard.

Joplin

Joplin is an open source markdown note-taking app. You can capture your idea and access them from any device. You can even extend it with plugins and integrations.

I wrote this article on a tablet and laptop with it.

Creative

GIMP

If your requirements can’t be handled by OmniTools, GIMP is an open source image editor comparable to Photoshop.

Programming

Docker Desktop?

You can install Bonfire via Docker. But, I am not sure you can use Docker Desktop. I hope so, because as a half-ass frontend developer it’s the only hope in hell I have for doing this myself. 😈

A quick aside, if I can't get it going on my own, it may be in the summer before the Bonfire test instance will be done.

As this is likely, I will be looking for help setting up the instance. Someone near Toulouse, France with Bonfire experience would be great. Or I guess I could hire the Bonfire team as a last resort. Provided they give large discounts to journalists promoting the platform. 🤨

In any event, Docker Desktop simplifies the process of building, sharing, and running applications in containers, ensuring consistency across different environments.

And obviously, you can use regular Docker.

Abra

You can also deploy Bonfire via the Co-op Cloud route via Abra.

Abra is the flagship client & command-line for Co-op Cloud. It has been developed specifically for the purpose of making the day-to-day operations of operators and maintainers pleasant & convenient. It is libre software, written in Go and maintained and extended by the community.

Thanks to @ozoned@btfree.social of Tube Free and BTFree for this recommendation. And he has this video that I will be watching.

Mosaic

If you read our first article, you will be familiar with Mosaic. And it will be a major tool used to build Bonfire communities. It's Bonfire's tool after all.

It bridges to third-party tools that:

import data from your existing tools
transform that data into rich ActivityPub activities for federation
enable meaningful, two-way interactions
respect your privacy boundaries and governance needs

JSON

JSON is used in JSON Activity Streams with ActivityPub. The docs note:

"In the most basic sense, an "Activity" is a semantic description of an action. It is the goal of this specification to provide a JSON-based syntax that is sufficient to express metadata about activities in a rich, human-friendly but machine-processable and extensible manner."

ActivityPub

Social Docs

Social Docs is third-party documentation for ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the Fediverse.

ActivityPub Fuzzer?

Fuzzer is a small program to help build social media software on the Fediverse. It emulates known Fediverse software, helping solve the problem where developers have to manually test compatibility with dozens of other projects.

I am not sure if Bonfire is one of them, But, if it's not let's hope it will be soon.

Another quick aside peeps, get the fuck off GitHub.

ActivityPub Book

Written by Evan Prodromou, the coauthor of the ActivityPub protocol and the Activity Streams 2.0 data format, this is the ActivityPub handbook that every social software hacker needs.

I have it and am slowly reading it.

ActivityPub Rocks

ActivityPub Rocks is an informative site maintained by the current steward of the ActivityPub stack of standards.

Team Tools

Codeberg

Codeberg is a community-led effort that provides Git hosting for free/open source projects. It features: no tracking, no third-party cookies, and no profiteering. Everything runs on their servers in Europe. Your data is not for sale.

Forgejo

If you want to roll your own Git solution, Forgejo is the way to go. It's a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Being easy to install and low maintenance, it gets the job done.

OpenProject

OpenProject is open source project management software for open source developers. It gives you classic, agile, or hybrid project management in a secure environment.

For my test instance I will use something simpler. Probably NextCloud’s Deck tool.

XWiki

XWiki innovates with "Structured Wiki" and delivers high knowledge features.

Again for my test instance I will use something simpler. Maybe Zim.

Elixir

Bonfire is implemented with its own dialect of the Elixir language. Like me if you had not heard of it before, Elixir is similar to Ruby on Rails or Python.

It runs on the Erlang VM. And it's capable of web programming, embedding software, machine learning, data pipelines, and processing multimedia. So, it's mega flexible and functional.

I know nothing about it, but I researched tools and found these.

Elixir Tools Suite

elixir-tools is a suite of developer tooling and packages for Elixir developers. Their goal is to provide tooling good enough that you think they're part of the core language project.

Testing Tool

ExUnit

One of the testing frameworks for Elixir is ExUnit. It is built-into the Elixir language and is a simple and intuitive tool for writing tests.

ExUnit follows the xUnit style, which will be familiar to developers who have worked with other testing frameworks. It provides everything they need to write comprehensive tests for their Elixir applications.

Database Tool

Ecto

Ecto is a popular Elixir database library providing a high-level and composable query interface for interacting with databases. You can define schemas, perform complex queries, and manage database transactions. Ecto also offers built-in support for database migrations, making it easy to evolve your database schema over time.

Elixir School

The previous tools have lessons in Elixir School which appears to be an excellent resource.

Frontend

Phoenix

Phoenix let's you build web applications quickly, with less code and fewer moving parts. It also runs on the Erlang VM with the ability to handle millions of WebSocket connections alongside Elixir's tooling for building robust systems. You can also deploy it with Docker.

LiveView

LiveView's main contributor wanted to create dynamic server-rendered applications without writing JavaScript. He was tired of the inevitable ballooning complexity that it brings (amen). He built LiveView to fix it.

Surface UI

Surface UI is a server-side rendering component library for Phoenix. It let's you start building rich interactive user-interfaces while writing minimal custom Javascript.

That sound perfect to me.

Liveview Native

If you are building Native apps Liveview Native is a framework extends Phoenix LiveView to native platforms, enabling real-time, interactive native applications with a unified codebase.

Wrapping it up

And that is enough for now. As I am slowly learning about Bonfire, I think the tools above would fit well in Bonfire workflows.

In this article we explored:

general productivity tools
writing tools
creative tools
general programming tools
ActivityPub tools
Mosaic
Elixir backend tools
and Elixir frontend tools

Have I missed anything? As mentioned in my previous article, this is all new to me. And I've only gone through about 20 percent of the Bonfire documentation. So, let me know what to add, correct, update, etc. This request is especially sincere if you’re working on a Bonfire project now.

Together, let’s build something for our communities with Bonfire! 🔥

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 23 January, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:10:16 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

SUB GHOST COMPONENT ON TPF

Featured Item(s)

The original article is in French, but I am summarizing in the English translation. Anyway, this is what we are up against. And we're definitely the underdog. 👿

Ploum writes:

For decades, I have been one of those people trying to alert you to the terrifying possibilities of technological blindness in which we are immersed.

I thought I had to explain, inform again and again.

I discover with dread that even those who understand what I am saying do not act. Even act in the opposite direction. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know very well what is going to happen. Artists defend Facebook and Spotify. The most left-wing politicians remain hooked on X as their only window to the world. Yet they are warned!

It’s just that they think they’re not concerned. It’s just that we naively think that it only happens to others. Whether we are, in one way or another, among those who will be privileged.

Don’t come and say you weren’t warned

Hamish Campbell writes:

A cohesive manifesto is needed as the world we inherited is fractured. Wealth, power, and knowledge are concentrated in the hands of the #nastyfew: platform owners, data hoarders, and corporate monopolies who extract value from our work, our attention, and our trust. Democracy has been hollowed out, captured and controlled by algorithms that decide what is knowable, profitable, and even true. Ecology, community, and care are sacrificed on the #deathcult altar of growth and consumption.

In this mess, the Open Media Network (#OMN) is a #KISS project that exists to reclaim the digital commons, reshape society, and redefine what is possible when power, knowledge, and technology are returned to the people.

Open Media Network: A Manifesto for the Digital Commons

This is how we can win. 😈

Open Media Network Site CMSs

The Torment Nexus explains:

Why blogging is better than social media

Great, great stuff. This is something we could have written. ;)

WordPress

WordPress.com is:

Introducing the Enhanced Code Block: Syntax Highlighting and More

WordPress.org announces:

A New Home for WordPress Education Programs

Developer WordPress has:

Streamlining block theme development with WordPress Playground and GitHub

This moves WP more toward DIY development for non-developers.

Make WordPress has:

What’s new in Gutenberg 22.4? (20 January)

Announcing the WordPress 7.0 Release Squad

Recap: WordPress 6.9 “Gene” Retrospective

The Repository reports:

WordPress 6.9.1 Scheduled for Early February as Bug Scrubs Begin

Ghost

Ghost has:

Filters for traffic analytics

MagicPages has:

What’s coming in 2026

Fighting Ghost Magic Link Spam (and Rethinking My CDN)

Updating 1,200 Ghost Sites

Ghost og:image Not Showing? Check Your Privacy Settings

Drupal CMS

Dripyard has a great debugging example:

How an unclosed < em > broke Drupal’s JavaScript

Grav CMS

Grav has a:

Cookbook with Recipes for solving common problems

Write.as

Inferno shares:

Sobre escribir blogs

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Organic Maps shares:

Higher-contrast dark theme colors, parking, rental, and charging capacity, and more in the January 2026 release

XWiki announces:

Release Notes for XWiki 18.0.0-rc-1

Chat

Signal announces:

Signal is working on sending view-once photos and videos from Signal Desktop

Ploum explains:

Why there’s no European Google?

Browsers

Pale Moon announces:

v34.0.0 (2026-01-20)

Cloud

Internet Exchange says:

What Do We Want? To Stop Using Google Docs.

Great case study.

Nextcloud announces:

A new chapter for digital autonomy: The Nextcloud Special Event with the Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter release

Creative

Speaking of creative, Chris Kirknielsen designed:

A no-AI icon for humans to use

There is a code block at the bottom of this post with Markdown and HTML code to link to the SVG on Chris's site.

Rep. Ro Khanna:

Introduces Resolution to Protect Creators in the Modern Platform-based Economy

It will go nowhere, but its a nice start.

Krita has its:

Monthly Report - January 2026

Programming Humor shares:

This Is Jehan Pages, The Top Developer Behind Gimp

Linux

Linux Journal reports:

Zorin OS 18 Crosses 2 Million Downloads, Cementing Its Appeal to New Linux Users

F-Droid has:

Three hundred reasons in two weeks

Wow. That's a lot of news. ;)

5 years of UnifiedPush

David Heidelberg explains:

Why I Will No Longer Contribute to postmarketOS

Drama.

TechGlow reviews:

The Jolla Phone Proved We’ve Been Using Smartphones Wrong All Along

Murena announces:

e/OS 3.4 version available for Official or Community builds

Hosting / Serving

Speaking of hosting, I moved all my sites from U.S.-based, A2 Hosting (who I never had a problem with) to Iceland-based, 1984 Hosting. Which is a great name.

The host I use for this site made a great decision:

A Small Change Behind the Scenes: EUR-Based Pricing

Kinsta asks:

What happens when one site gets hacked on shared hosting?

cPanel announces:

cPanel & WHM version 126

Good news about the HTML editor.

This week's featured OMN tool

Framatoolbox

Using Framatoolbox is the first step on the road to your digital autonomy.

OMN Programming

Dries Buyaert explores:

Funding Open Source for Digital Sovereignty

This times 100.

CSS Tricks examines the:

HTTP Archive 2025 Web Almanac

HTML

Google announces:

Introducing the HTML element

Smashing Mag looks at:

Rethinking “Pixel Perfect” Web Design

HTMX

HTMX has a case-study:

Building Critical Infrastructure with htmx: Network Automation for the Paris 2024 Olympics

CSS

Frontend Masters reports:

Firefox Goes CSS Modules

JavaScript

jQuery announces:

jQuery 4.0.0

Nice.

ESLint announces:

ESLint's 2025 year in review

It now lints CSS and HTML as well as Markdown, JSON, and of course JavaScript.

AI

Hamish Campbell says:

There is no intelligence in AI – and no path to any

Platformer explores:

The AI productivity paradox

The Guardian and Cory Doctorow share:

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

TechPolicy Press reports:

AI Agents are Rewriting the Web’s Rules of Engagement. Here’s a Way to Fix it.

404 Media reports:

How Wikipedia Will Survive in the Age of AI

Other

Nothing stood out here this week.

This week's featured programming tool

HTMX

HTMX allows access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and SSE directly in HTML.

ActivityPub

Nothing this week. :(

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

The name is self-explanatory.

ActivityPub Academy

Fediverse

Hamish Campbell shares:

Europe, the Fediverse, and the story we failed to tell

These are the types of things that may have led the W project to choose ATProto over ActivityPub.

IFTAS examines:

Behind the Numbers: Who Moderates the Social Web?

Vernissage announces:

[Vernissage 1.29.0 is out!]
https://mastodon.social/@vernissage/115914983027268250

It is PixelFed for professional photographers.

Nation Cymru reports:

Welsh social network launches campaign inspired by Dewi Sant

Sandra De Jong asks:

Hoe wordt Mastodon jouw plek? (als mens en als ondernemer) – Een stappenplan

GoToSocial has:

An update

Bonfire

Bonfire announces:

Bonfire 1.0.1: Building Momentum

Thanks to the Bonfire for mentioning my article, Grab a seat at our Bonfire: the revolutionary community platform.

Ozoned shares:

Light Up the Net: Step‑by‑Step Bonfire Installation

I will definitely be checking this out.

This week's featured Fediverse Platform/Tool/Resource

Mbin (successor to Kbin) is a federated content aggregator, voting, discussion, and microblogging platform.

Matrix has:

This Week in Matrix 2026-01-16

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

9 to 5 Mac reports:

Threads will start showing ads to all users next week

Threads started as shit and will always be shit.

A New Social announces:

Launch: Domain Blocklists

A better response to Bluesky's becoming a Nazi bar is to make BridgyFed compatible with Blacksky, Northsky, Pinksky, etc.

I ran across this earlier this week:

Modal Foundation

Free Our Feeds has more:

Free Our Feeds - Update #7, January 2026

We have to keep our eyes on this to make sure it goes the way it should.

ATProto Community has:

Erin Kissane: People In Protocols, a Research Update

Nick Gerakines: Smoke Signal, a journey in building open ecosystems for communities

Well, Bluesky has decided which side of the fascism fence it's on, so it's more important than ever for non-bluesky devs to build non-bluesky ATProto projects.

Like:

W for ATProto

And I never had much hope for Bluesky (it was doomed to enshittification from the start), but it's off The Fulcrum's Ghost site now.

eMail Newsletters

Buttondown has:

Ask a Nerd: What are good open, click, and response rates for an email newsletter?

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts


![No AI SVG](https://chriskirknielsen.com/assets/img/no-ai.svg)

<img src="https://chriskirknielsen.com/assets/img/no-ai.svg" alt="No AI SVG" width="75px">

The Programmer's Fulcrum 16 January, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 21:56:06 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.

The second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.

We publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.

There's good stuff in all of our categories, so please take the time to enjoy and bookmark the items most relevant to your goals. We hope you are inspired to create new ones.

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs
Tools
Programming
ActivityPub
Fediverse
More

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.

Featured Item(s)

These do not fit into a category so I am sharing them here.

TechCrunch reports:

The team is small, inventory isn’t being manufactured before it’s sold, and there’s no outside funding.

Pebble founder says his new company is ‘not a startup’

If you are going to build a hardware for opensource company, this is a good way to do it.

CSID shows us:

How to Build an Organic Community… Inorganically

Open Media Network Site CMSs

WordPress

WordPress has:

What’s new for developers? (January 2026)

Good work on responsive grids.

Dropping support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3.

WordPress Playground Brings Speed, Stability, and Momentum

The Blueprints Gallery is a great resource.

The Repository reports:

WordPress 7.0 Planning Continues With Call for Release Squad Volunteers

Misunderstandings Over AI Use Fuel Confusion Around WordPress.org Plugin Reviews

Rich Tabor explains:

Giving my blog a voice

A legitimate use for AI at least.

Ghost

Progressier shows us how to:

Turn your Ghost Website into a PWA

Interesting if you have a large site.

FreeCodeCamp has this course:

How to Build a Custom Ghost CMS Theme

Synaps Media demonstrates:

How to create tables in Ghost?

Useful.

Drupal CMS

While these don't relate directly to DrupalCMS, this is a big week for Drupal.

Founder Dries Buyaert shares:

25 years of Drupal: what I've learned

See lessons 2, 11, 14, and 21.

Drupal has:

Drupal Turns 25 Today

My Drupal buddy, Carlos Ospina shares:

I Wanted to Celebrate Drupal's 25th. So I Built Something for Our Moms.

Building local and very targeted niche sites can be a legitimate use for AI. I guess Claude is one of the best of a shitty bunch of assistants. The Drupal community seems to like it.

Micro.blog

Jarrod Blundy notes:

Micro.blog offers an indie alternative to YouTube with its ‘Studio’ video hosting plan

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Hamish Campbell has:

Software licenses and the geekproblem

Anil Dash looks at:

Wikipedia at 25: What the web can be

Chat

Philipe Baez shows us:

How to deploy a Chatmail server

Browsers

This is a fantastic little service!

Just the Browser

Cloud

I'm going a little further back in time for this one:

A brave year for digital sovereignty: Nextcloud 2025 Wrap-Up

Writing

Joplin announces:

Joplin 3.5

Scribus announces:

Scribus 1.7.2 Released

Creative

How to Geek reports:

Latest KDE release includes great updates for Kdenlive and KDE Connect

Kdenlive has all the details:

Kdenlive 25.12.1 released

Linux

Linux Journal reports:

Linux Kernel 6.19-rc4 Released as Development Marches On

Linux Mint announces:

Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” released!

Graphene OS announces:

A new set of Releases

Sailfish OS shares:

Sailfish Community News, 8th January 2026 - New Year

Hosting / Serving

cPanel announces:

cPanel & WHM version 134

Elena Rossini continues a superb series:

A newbie's guide to self-hosting with YunoHost. Part 3: Let’s install NextCloud

Cloudflare asks:

What came first: the CNAME or the A record?

This week's featured OMN tool

My final paid project was a large video series, so I am featuring Trelby.

It's a free, mult-iplatform, feature-rich screenwriting program!

OMN Programming

Infoworld explores:

6 incredibly hyped (AKA horseshit) software trends that failed to deliver.

Let’s drive these failures all the way out of existence.

Julia Evans examines:

A data model for Git (and other docs updates)

Markdown

Anil Dash explains:

How Markdown took over the world

An inspiring example of building a tool for a community and the tool then taking over a world.

HTML

Terence Eden looks at:

Maximally Semantic Structure for a Blog Post

Thomas Steiner shares:

A polyfill for the HTML switch element

Cool.

HTMHell advises:

Replacing JS with just HTML

Swallow this advice hook, line, and sinker.

HTMX

Mahdi M. explains:

Why You Should Give HTMX a Shot

He also linked out to this resource.

Hypermedia Systems

CSS

Dave Rupert explores:

Focus rings with nested contrast-color()?

CSS Tricks examines:

Playing With CodePen slideVars

W3 Tutorials aks:

What's the Difference Between Putting CSS Files in <head> vs. <body>? Key Impacts Explained

WebKit announces:

New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes

Manuel Matuzović shares:

Better defaults for popovers

Great tip.

Web Components

ZeroHeight lists:

5 accessibility checks to run on every component

Florian Geierstanger has:

The Missing Link for Web Components

JavaScript

Navanath Jadhav has:

I Converted My React App to Vanilla JavaScript — Here’s What Happened

A fantastic K.I.S.S. example.

AI

The Register reports:

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Nice and a great example of Techno Anarchism.

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

This is awesome and I added it to my sites.

Most devs don't trust AI-generated code, but fail to check it anyway

Please don’t be that person.

If you have to use it be this one. The New Stack reports:

The Key to Agentic Success? BASH Is All You Need

Other

XWiki announces:

XWiki and Cryptpad communities meetup at FOSDEM 2026

Forgejo announces:

Forgejo v14.0 is available

And OpenProject announces:

OpenProject 17.0.0

This week's featured programming tool

Speaking of OpenProject is open source project management software.

ActivityPub

The Social Web Foundation announces:

New Social Web Working Group at W3C

Connected Places looks at the consequences:

Fediverse Report – #149 – On Protocol Governance

Smarter Articles explores:

Interoperability or Isolation: The Standards Battle Shaping Social Media

Interesting, though long.

ActivityPub for WordPress has:

WordPress Federation: Recap of 2025

On a related note, Alex Masters examines:

ActivityPub Gremlins

Larvitz provides:

Mastodon on FreeBSD: Production-Grade Service Scripts

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Social Docs is the comprehensive developer resource for ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the Fediverse.

Fediverse

Maho Pacheco looks at:

The Forkiverse Experiment and Why Instance Choice Matters

TootWales announces:

Less Clutter, More Cwtch: Introducing the Tŵt App

Renaissance Design opines on it:

Vendor lock-in is hostile to the Fediverse

Social Media Alternatives shares:

Teaching Mastodon: Ethics, Moderation, and the Work of Participation

Jaz-Micael King has:

There Is One Fediverse. There Are A Thousand Ways To Join It.

Another fantastic example of an open social/open media network/community project.

If you could do this with a Bonfire instance it would be incredible.

Bonfire

Bonfire has a case study:

Gifting with Integrity: Federated Digital Spaces for Mutual Aid Networks

This week's featured Fediverse Platform/Tool/Resource

Mobilizon helps online platforms to create, share and find events.

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

A Cloud Nihilist explores:

A Model for addressing privacy on ATproto

Just FYI, whatever Blacksky and Northsky are doing is 10,000 times more important than whatever the fuck Bluesky is doing.

ATProto Community has:

Rashid Aziz: Extending ATproto for private data

Marc Faddoul: Developing the AT infra ecosystem and governance

Devin Ivy: The Shape of Apps to Come

eMail Newsletters

Ghost examines:

Email clipping warnings

Buttondown announces:

Announcement bars for your archives

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community!

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts