Forem: Reuben Walker, Jr.

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 22 May, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:20:32 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

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

It's your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism.

As usual, 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.

Sites/Blogs/CMSs
Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools
OMN 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)

Bonfire writes:

Since the 1.0 release of Bonfire Social, we've been heads-down listening to our our pilot communities, beta testers, and co-design partners.

Version 1.0.3 is the result: a release focused on stability and polish, which fixes a wide range of bugs and brings meaningful usability improvements, especially around feeds, boundaries, and more advanced features.

It also ships a set of new capabilities born from our ongoing collaboration with Jacobin DE.

Bonfire 1.0.3: Stability, Clarity, and Federated Publishing

Awesome. The "calm empowerment" for boundaries and posts sounds great. And the same philosophy will be integrated into groups. Loading the dashboard immediately is another good choice. I am especially psyched about the community publishing with Ghost integration. This is the same thinking behind their LAUTI integration for events.

Hamish Campbell writes:

The KISS secret about the noise in “digital sovereignty” is very simple – ignore most of this branding and build commons tech instead. That’s the path, not another layer of management, another funding bureaucracy, or a glossy strategy document. Not another NGO conference circuit explaining why nothing can happen without another round of funding. Just build working commons.

This matters because much of the EU “digital sovereignty” conversation is simply more churn inside the same neoliberal, mainstreaming logic that created the problem in the first place.

Compost “digital sovereignty”, build working commons

This is one of the major reasons we're building Manade on top of Bonfire.

Speaking of, the co-op handling the setup and hosting for us says:

Wow @Bonfire is so cool!

I'm glad they're enthusiastic. And I am happy to be their initial test subject. ;) And I'm also fortunate I can afford the higher costs of early adopters. Consider it a service to the community or penance for my bad karma.

And finally, we published another Bonfire article this week, so check out the Bonfire section at the bottom of this post.

CMSs

Simon Repp announces:

Random Faircamp 2.0 development updates

Dries Buyaert explains:

Why Drupal CMS matters

It does make Drupal easier, but still not easy. No KISS promotion here.

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Working on supporting account aliases in Ghost

This is now live

Fan-fucking-tastic!

Working on adding support in Ghost for custom web domain for your handle

Hopefully, all of these aren't just for the pro plan.

Spectral Web Services explores:

Sitewide socials, theme editing, switching platforms again, and more

Tools

This one is a little philosophical and slightly trippy, but The Lazurus Corporation shares:

Against the tyranny of the Apollonian

We're definitely Dionysian. 🍸 🏴‍☠️

Smashing Frames ruminates:

On Google declaring war on the Web

Fuck Google and obviously don't use their shit.

The Register reports:

LocalSend puts your sneakernet out of business

Chat

Zulip shares:

Announcing the Zulip Foundation

Browsers

9to5Linux reports:

Firefox 151 Is Now Available for Download, This Is What’s New

Cybernews reports:

Brussels’ DMA regulation handed Firefox millions of new users

Great. Let’s hope the trend continues and they then move on to Firefox forks. See just below.

Tuta examines the:

Best Private Browsers 2026 | Zero Trackers

Hopefully, you're using one of these right now.

Cloud

Taylor and Francis has:

Cloud drift: how hyperscaler cloud computing shapes internet governance

Writing

LibreOffice has:

There is no digital sovereignty without ODF

How your donations help the LibreOffice project and community

Free Knowledge Institute looks at:

Cooperative Clouds: How LaSuite.coop Is Building a New Model for Digital Sovereignty

Creative

GIMP announces:

GIMP on MS Store now requires Windows Build 20348

Linux/Open Android

OSTechnix reports:

Linux Kernel 7.1 RC4 Released: Torvalds Slams “Pointless” AI Bug Reports

There is an easy fix for this problem (no AI). FYI, this is a typically poorly designed news site.

Larvitz Blog

mdo on FreeBSD 15: Base-System Privilege Delegation with mac_do

Gridranger shows us:

How to select a mobile OS

Solid article. And interesting site design.

PostmarketOS has:

losetup upgrade results in boot failure

My Linux peeps, we have to all get on the same page (at least for mobile OS) if we're going to have a chance to deep six Apple and Google. KISS as possible, please.

This week's featured OMN tool

Framatoolbox

The free and ethical toolkit.

Framatoolbox

Programming

Javier Tia looks at:

Two FOSDEM talks on the CRA, from opposite sides of the table

Terence Eden notes:

GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source

Cyber Security News reports:

Google reCAPTCHA Update Blocks Privacy-Focused Android Users From Sites

Mon amis, please don't use anything from Google on your sites. Explore hCaptcha, ALTCHA, or Friendly Captcha.

Nick Stambaugh on:

Selling an HTML file for a few grand

KISS = cash. ;)

Git

Bleeping Computer reports:

GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

Why would you sue anything from Microslop? At least check out VS Codium, Forgejo, and Codeberg.

Alex Hyett asks:

GitHub is dead, What's next?

Jorijn Schrijvershof explains:

Why I'm leaving GitHub for Forgejo

Michael Thomas demonstrates:

Auto-Deploying a static site from Forgejo to CloudFlare Pages

If your site is open source or personal, please use Codeberg not Cloudflare.

Markdown

Files MD is:

A free, quiet space for thinking. Private, no data is sent to server.

HTML

My favorite blog to view (eyes wise), Evil Martians

600+ million people write right-to-left: 2 fixes your app needs

Twig

Symfony announces:

Twig 3.25.0 released

CSS

Julia Evans is leaving Failwind:

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Fantastic.

JavaScript

A Bi Disaster explores:

The tyranny of single page apps

AI

Where's your Ed at? marvels:

What If...We're In An AI Bubble? (Part 1)

Get it? And by the way, we fucking are.

Dhruv Ahuja says:

I owe my career to open-source communities. I'm not sure newcomers can say the same

Same here and owed in my case.

This week's featured programming tool

Zeroform

Zeroform is a static and dynamic online form generator.

Zeroform

A nice example of someone building something for the community.

ActivityPub

Huey Lee explores:

Configuring SSO on Mastodon

Evan Prodromou explains:

For the #ActivityPubAPI, we need a profile of OAuth to use for accessing the actor's data

Hollo announces:

Hollo 0.9.0 is out

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Fediverse Developer Matrix Network

A place for people developing software for the Fediverse, using protocols such as ActivityPub and ActivityStreams, HTTP signatures and Webfinger.

Fediverse Developer Network

Fediverse

&nbsp

Fedivariety reviews:

FediVariety’s unconference: Nodes On A Web

Sefan Bohacek shows us how to:

Make your website or blog Fediverse-ready

FediLab Apps is:

Exploring a desktop version of Holos, and early tests are promising

Edmond recommends:

Blocking the "meta-externalagent" user agent from your web server

Technically Good continues a series:

Alternatives Pt. II - Social Networking

A good one to share with a newbie or a friend you want to free from Techno Feudalism.

PeerTube announces:

We've just published #PeerTube 8.1.6

Friendica announces:

Friendica 2026.05 released

Bonfire

We published:

Bonfire: A Social Platform Apart

And did you see our featured articles?

Connected Places has:

FR 163 – Decrypting Matrix

It's good to see they will start covering Matrix more.

Fabio Manganiello announces:

chat-translate is a new project

RSS

Rob Hoeijmakers says:

RSS is not dead. It just changed audience.

But, we can still use it as intended.

Entropic Thoughts looks at:

Article previews in RSS

Half An Hour explores:

Adding DID to RSS and Atom Feeds

DanQ is:

Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS

And Terry Godier examines:

Phantom Obligation

Other Federated Social Media

The Atmosphere Community shares:

ATStore, the Atmosphere Directory, and Community Involvement

The development apps would be relevant here. Marque and Syntax Club seem useful. And Tangled of course.

Second Brain updates:

AT Protocol Resources and Tools

Boltless shares:

Tangled: Knot-stored COB proposal

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

ATmosphere 1.0.0 — Liftoff

Yes, it's in the correct section. ;)

Frank Hecker moves from:

From Bluesky to Blacksky

Great.

Democracy Tech

Unredacted shares its mission:

Keeping the doors open

Commons Network reviews the:

New European partnership against dependence on Big Tech

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or Surf 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

Bonfire: A Social Platform Apart

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:08:08 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

It explores what sets Bonfire apart (for its users) from closed commercial social platforms and even its peers on open social.

(And it will also note which capabilities our Manade project will or will not enable. Manade is an example / starter private instance of Bonfire that {preferably} local communities can {preferably} use democratically to support themselves against techno feudalism and surveillance capitalism without government interference).

The Difference

As mentioned in a previous article:

"Bonfire stands apart from other Fediverse platforms due to its Circles, Boundaries, and upcoming Groups. Designed for extensibility and experimentation, it focuses on local-first, community-driven governance. It's also more privacy/security-focused than its peers."

You can get into the nitty gritty of any of the topics below by visiting the Bonfire documentation.

I am basically simplifying and paraphrasing them in this article in any case. Like most of us, I am fairly new to Bonfire myself.

Profiles

You can have four profiles per Bonfire account which is unique. They show up as separate identities - personal, work, or project / community ones for example.

Consequently, you have both one account and individual profile settings.

As you would expect, account settings are the default preferences for all your profiles (language, notification preferences, privacy defaults, etc.).

Profile settings override those defaults for your individual profiles. This gives you the freedom to customize how each profile appears and behaves, independently from your main account.

Create or manage profiles by:

going to your account settings and selecting Profiles.
clicking Create Profile.
setting a username and display name
adding a bio
and adding an avatar

<br>

That’s it.

Then choose privacy setting options for each profile:

"People need to make a request before they can follow me." When enabled, others must send a follow request that you approve before they can follow your profile.
"Make my profile publicly discoverable." When you choose this your profile can be found in Bonfire directories, the Fediverse, and search engines. (This won't be enabled in Manade as it's a private community by default).
"Make my content searchable." This choice allows your posts and content to be indexed and found via search in Bonfire, the Fediverse, and search engines. (Again this will be disabled by default in Manade).

Your admin will be able to set up whatever your community desires.

Your Bonfire address is in the format:

@username@yourinstance.etc

Where username is the name you choose when signing up. And yourinstance.etc is the domain of the Bonfire instance you joined.

You will also have a link to an individual profile, such as https://yourinstance.etc/@you (personal) or https://yourinstance.etc/@your_project. (project profile).

Also note that by default, your different profiles are not publicly linked—each appears as a separate identity.

You can switch between profiles as needed when posting or interacting.

Finally, remember to select your preferred settings for each profile.

Circles

Bonfire Circles are lists of users that individual users and admins can create based on levels of trust and intimacy. And permissions control circle activities.

Shared Circles are co-managed by users and can include other Fediverse users (interoperability). (Again this will be disabled for Manade as it's a members only, quick start instance).

Everyone in a circle can be followed. Circles can also be used as lists or to filter sidebar feeds. And they can be made into custom feeds.

Bonfire allows you to define circles based on your unique style of relationships and interests. And circles give you the ability to manage relationships and activities in a way that works for you.

You can find your circles in settings and create new ones. Add members to a circle when creating it or by editing an existing circle.

And every circle has its own feed, showing posts and activities from its members.

Circles are private by default, but you can share a circle with others.

When someone receives your share link (and has permission via the boundary you selected), they can:

View the circle's feed and see activities from its members.
See a list of members and optionally click a "Follow all members" button to quickly follow everyone in the circle.

Admins can create default circles. Bonfire also comes with some default circles, like “people I follow”. Obviously, these capabilities makes it simple to coordinate, discover, and connect with others in your Bonfire instance. It's all up to you.

Boundaries

As you might expect, Boundaries are limits that you place on yourself or other users to control what you're comfortable with while using Bonfire.

They control how others interact with individual users' content / posts / activities etc. And there are many options.

Bonfire succinctly notes: "Boundaries takes things to the next level by enabling you to combine one or more circles and then grant specific roles to each circle."

And they are compatible with Mastodon quote authorizations and GoToSocial interaction controls. (But not for Manade of course).

With Boundaries you can allow your "friends" circle to reply and like, but restrict "acquaintances" to only read. You can even block a specific user from interacting at all.

Define boundaries when posting or create one in your boundary settings. Just give it a name and description and you can reuse it anytime you post and want to apply the same boundaries.

Groups

Bonfire Groups have come along since some of our previous articles.

They are self-governed spaces where members from different servers coordinate, collaborate, and organize around shared topics without platform lock-in. (Obviously, this will be disabled in Manade. Again, it's a private not public starter instance. But you can also create groups inside a Manade instance. I think.)

Anyway, groups can be public, private, or unlisted with fine-grained control over who can see their content.

Community members can join groups, leave at any time, and admins will manage membership, roles, and permissions. Along with moderators they manage content and enforce community standards.

As an user, you may create posts, discussions, and threaded conversations within a group. These are separate from your personal feed. This is fairly unique in the Fediverse.

When enabled, group posts and activities can appear in remote Fediverse platforms. There, remote users can interact with them at a basic level.

And you can discover public groups based on interests, topics, or recommendations.

Channels

Groups can have multiple channels (topics / rooms) for various topics. This has the benefit of allowing group members to organize conversations without everything collapsing into one poorly navigable feed. This is similar to Matrix's functionality.

Feeds, Custom Feeds, & Filters

Speaking of feeds, Bonfire gives you powerful tools to customize your experience via your navigation controls as well as in feeds and timelines.

Select the feeds that appear in your navigation section. They include:

presets like Following, Local, Articles, Bookmarks, Explore, Likes, and more (Events, Audio, Images, Bookmarks, etc.).
and your custom circles of people are also shown as feeds, as mentioned above.

You can filter feeds:

by content types (only images, only articles, only events, etc.).
by activity types (only boosts, only replies, etc.).
and by time range, local / remote, and more.

Extensibility

Widgets

Bonfire developers can create widgets. They are reusable components that encapsulate data and provide context-specific information to users based on the pages they are currently viewing.

Widgets are typically placed in the right sidebar and developers can define which widgets should appear on each page and in what order.

Developers can also include options for users to enable, disable, or rearrange the order of some widgets.

They usually consist of a title and data formatted in various ways. They could include links, data visualizations, actions, or information fetched from third-party apps.

(FYI, Manade will try to avoid 3rd party widgets and apps unless Bonfire explicitly integrates them. For example Ghost CMS and their LAUTI calendar capabilities. And I am not sure about those to be honest).

Extensions

(Also, Manade will come with limited extensions {maybe the two below}, at this point.)

Bonfire's extensions are code collections that deliver new features and enhance the platform's functionality. Or they could create a different user experience for an existing feature.

For example adding entirely new pages, such as bonfire_invite_links. These let admins create and share invites with usage limit and expiration date. They could also implement specific components or widgets.

Another example is bonfire_editor_milkdown, which integrates a markdown-first editor for publishing activities. Which is fantastic as we recommend writing everything in markdown.

Extensions are versatile:

they can implement their own schema, database, logic, and components
they can leverage existing fields, context functions, and UI components
or more commonly, a combination of both.

So, your instance's developers and admins have a tremendous amount of customization power.

Community-driven governance

Instance admins also have access to advanced tools to manage users, extensions, and the overall health of their Bonfire instance.

These tools include:

user management
instance settings
circles, roles & boundaries management
and advanced monitoring and maintenance.

Of course your community's admins, moderators, and user members can democratically agree on its norms.

(As a starter instance, Manade will be a magical kingdom run by an enlightened despot, me. 😉 But, communities will customize it in their image {democratic I hope} once their admins have the instance up and running).

Privacy/security-focused

As you saw in the boundaries section above, Bonfire provides flexible tools to help you manage your experience, protect your boundaries, and keep your community safe.

You can also flag or hide posts.

To flag, report a post to moderators for review. You should explain which boundaries were broken and the action you request. To hide a post just remove it your feed. You can still view it via direct link.

Blocking in Bonfire includes silencing and ghosting.

If you silence someone it hides all content from that user in your feeds. You won't see their posts, mentions, or messages, but you can still view their profile via direct link.

Ghosting stops a user or instance from seeing or interacting with you or your content. They won't see your private posts, can't follow you, and you can't mention or message them.

When you block someone Bonfire combines both the silence and ghost functionality.

You can manage your block, silence, and ghost lists from the Safety section in the sidebar. You are in total control. This is rare in the Fediverse.

Bonfire also lets you import blocklists from trusted sources to silence or ghost multiple users or instances at once. These are a fantastic resource.

And of course admins and moderators can do all of this instance wide. Be sure to give them your input.

OK, that's enough for now.

Wrapping it up

As you have seen, Bonfire might (just maybe) have the potential to be the everything app of the open web. 🤯

And it contributes to the trend of people leaving public social for authentic, private, and preferably local communities. This a truly fortunate one IMHO. 😈

In any event, Bonfire is very flexible, customizable, and even a little anarchic. 🏴‍☠️

Other open social platforms will have similar capabilities. And there are simpler options available. I am impressed with Acorn from Blacksky which is built with ATProto. However, it's not self-hostable.

But for the reasons stated here, I believe Bonfire provides the flexibility and potential to alter what social media and the open web mean to communities. And that is supporting communities against techno feudalism and surveillance capitalism. ⛓️‍💥 Fuck them and techno fascists. 🗡️💣 🪢

That's why we've fallen in love with the idea of Bonfire. And our Manade project 🐴 is going to help in a small way to bring that potential to fruition and to you and your communities!

Thanks for reading and go build a community on Bonfire. 🔥 Eventually you will be able to with Manade.

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 15 May, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:23:25 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

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

It's your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism.

As usual, we aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening authoritarianism.

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.

Sites/Blogs/CMSs
Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools
OMN 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)

Matt Duggan writes:

I am, mostly, grateful for the bounty the internet has provided. But there is something wrong, deeply wrong, with what we built. The wrongness was there at the start. It was baked into the foundation by people who told themselves a story about freedom, and that story was a lie, and we are all, every one of us, paying their tab.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyber-libertarianism

If you want to understand why 60 and up slightly anarchic punks like me feel, think, and act the way we do, read this.

Eirene Evripidou writes:

A poem on your own site can sit quietly for years and still feel alive. The same poem posted to a social platform is usually swallowed in hours, buried under trends, adverts, and the anxious theatre of relevance.

That is the real tension in open web vs social media. It is not only about where we publish. It is about who sets the conditions for attention, memory, authorship, and voice.

For artists, writers, and independent thinkers, this distinction matters more than the usual platform debates admit.

Open Web vs Social Media

We also published an article this week. It’s in the Fediverse section under Bonfire.

CMSs

Josh Brody says:

We made this hard: over-engineering the web

A beautiful explanation of KISS. And as a 62 year old, I can relate.

Silex announces:

Silex is now officially an ow2 project

This may be worth checking out.

Pure Blog is:

Upgrading to v3.0.0 and Moving to Codeberg

Bon.

Grizzly Gazette shows us:

How to make your blog more accessible, and why you should care

pckt is:

Settling in, and looking ahead

Pica announces:

Password-protected Posts and Pages

Musa Al-hassy explores:

Blogging with Emacs & Org-mode

Simon Reep announces:

I wrapped up the initial, biggest part of the docs overhaul for Faircamp 2.0

Terence Eden shows us how to:

Find WordPress blog posts with missing featured images - and missing alt text - without a plugin

Useful.

Bear

Leaflet

ClassicPress

Backdrop CMS

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Easy theme editing

Great but unfortunately, this may only be for Pro plans.

Magic Pages announces:

AI Crawler Controls on Magic Pages

Same here.

Grav CMS

Micro.blog

Micro.blog announces:

Micro.blog 3.9 for Mac is out

Retiring Micro.one

Tools

Ben Werdmuller states:

AI may be the new gatekeepers, but human connection is more needed than ever

Yep. But, don't get discouraged. We have more tools to fight back with than ever.

Wladimir Wofty examines:

Non-paper by the Netherlands: an integrated approach for the EU tech sovereignty package

LibreOffice announces:

Projects selected for LibreOffice in the Google Summer of Code 2026

Chat

Signal announces:

Signal adds extra confirmations and education to help prevent phishing

Browsers

LibreWolf announces:

LibreWolf v150.0.2-1 is now available

Search

TugaTech announces:

xPrivo 4.0 lança índice de pesquisa europeu totalmente independente

Kagi shares:

Tips to get precise, more relevant results for academic work

Internet Exchange looks at:

Search After Google

Cloud

It's FOSS shares:

I Moved My Photos from OneDrive to Ente Photos, and I'm Not Going Back

Nextcloud reports:

Swiss independence on American terms? Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Bern shows how the Swiss explore sovereignty

Writing

Joplin shares:

What's new in Joplin 3.6

The improved markdown editor significantly improves the writing experience.

Creative

Kdenlive announces:

Kdenlive 26.04.1 is out

Linux/Open Android

9to5Linux reports:

TUXEDO BM 15 Is an Upgradable Business Linux Laptop with Smartcard and 4G LTE

KDE Receives Over €1M from Sovereign Tech Fund for Software Development

This may have driven it to some degree:

EU OS proposes to equip public sector computers with KDE and distribute software also via Flatpak.

PostmarketOS has:

postmarketOS in 2026-04: new boot splash

New financed postmarketOS project: q6voice(d)

DTMF tones are broken on the PinePhone with latest ModemManager

Larvitz Blog explores:

FreeBSD Resource Monitoring, Accounting, and Troubleshooting

Juhani Lehtimäki notes:

The upcoming F-Droid 2.0 (in alpha release) UI is modern and easy-to-use

F-Droid shares:

This Week in F-Droid

Please check out Snowflake Volunteer.

Heise reports:

Google's new reCAPTCHA: Potential hurdle for Google-free Android variants

Golem has more:

Neue Recaptcha-Abfrage für Google-freie Smartphones problematisch

Just more of Google's c^ntness in destroying the internet.

Hosting / Serving

MakefileFeld says:

My Mail Hosting Has Come Full Circle

Probably Odyssey shows us how to:

Secure Home Server Access with Caddy, Tailscale, and Cloudflare

Local First

Prototype Fund examines:

The Road to a Local-First App Ecosystem

This week's featured OMN tool

Bludit

Bludit lets you create your own website in seconds. It's a simple, fast, secure, flat-file CMS.

Bludit

Programming

LibreOffice looks at:

Why a digital document is a piece of software, and what that means for your freedom

Great article.

Anna Filina says:

You heard of enshittification. I propose its spiritual successor: ensloppification.

And Mat Marquis says:

No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use.”

See my Google comment above.

Lucas Cantor has an Eleventy ( now Build Awesome) case study:

Rebuilding lucascantor.com

Great stuff, Lucas.

Kevin Boone shares:

In praise of HTTP

Git

Tao Bojlén explores:

The forge we deserve

Forgejo announces:

Forgejo 15.0.2 and 11.0.14 were just released

Not to be outdone by GitHub's fiasco, GitLab announces:

GitLab Act 2

GitLab is officially becoming ShitLab.

Markdown

Rob Hoeijmakers examines:

Markdown, the WD-40 of Digital Information

An apt metaphor.

HTML

Frank Taylor says:

You don’t know HTML Lists

One to bookmark.

Olivier Forget announces:

Hello BackflipHTML

Interesting side project. But, I think a Hotwire derivative is what he's looking for.

Jim Nielsen says:

Out With the JS, In With the HTML

Let's all out with the JS as much as possible.

CSS

Speaking of, LLBBL looks at:

Three CSS Features That Finally Let Us Delete the JavaScript

vtbag explores:

View Transition Names and Generated Pseudo-Elements

CSS Wizardry examines:

Better Browser Caching with No-Vary-Search

Ahmad Shadeed looks at:

Media Queries Range Syntax

Frontend Masters demonstrates:

Repeating Square Dots Backgrounds in CSS

It's overkill, but still an interesting effect.

Web Components

Xoron continues a series:

Dim: Async State Management

AI

Where's your Ed at? explores:

Premium: AI's Circular Psychosis

By the gods, this horseshit can’t collapse soon enough. Thunor my Lord, strike them dead! 🌩️💀

The Register reports:

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator

This week's featured programming tool

Zeroform

Zeroform is a static and dynamic online form generator.

Zeroform

ActivityPub

Rasterweb explores:

Auto-Bookmark Posting

Fedify announces:

Fedify security updates: 1.9.10, 1.10.9, 2.0.16, 2.1.12, and 2.2.1

BotKit security updates: 0.3.2 and 0.4.1

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Emissary

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

Emissary

Fediverse

Connected Places has:

FR 162 – EU Regulation Won’t Save Open Social Networks

Well fuck. :(

Jaz-Michael King continues a series:

There Are a Million Fediverses. Some of Them Are Louder than Others.

There are some good points here.

Forge CMS announces:

Forge-social: scheduling social posts from your Forge CMS

FediForum announces:

The Fediverse now has its own link-in-bio, with new project FediProfile

Elefeed announces:

Elefeed was created to experiment with new ways to manage and view content on Mastodon

Fedilab Apps has:

Fedilab 3.40.0 is available

CastLab supports FCast because it is an open source casting protocol

Holos announces:

Holos 1.5.6 is available

MMMX has recommendations:

Instead of Instagram

Vernissage announces:

We released #Vernissage 1.36.0

Steve Mookie Kong shares:

After three months and 1.6k posts later on snac ...

Engadget reports:

Threads users are pissed they can't block Meta's new AI chatbot

Inevitable enshittification for people shitty enough to use or federate with it.

Stefan Bohacek shows us:

How to make a website in 5 minutes: (Almost) No code version

For the few non-developers reading this.

Bonfire

We published:

It's Time to Savor the Flavours of Bonfire

Arstechnica has:

RIP social media. What comes next is messy.

Prosocial Design promotes:

Quality Scores: Increase engagement with high quality content

Great idea, if you could actually implement it.

A New Social (the BridyFed, Bounce peeps) has:

Bridging on a budget

Webrings

scientiac::syntropy shares a generic:

Indieweb Webring Button

Merci!

RSS

Rob Fahrni explores:

Making RSS and Blogs Better

Mijndert Stuij examines:

Fixing headline-only RSS feeds with rss-fulltext

WaspDev advises:

Avoid using < ![CDATA[ ... ]] > in RSS

FreshRSS announces:

FreshRSS 1.29.0

And Terry Godier announces:

Current v1.0.14 is rolling out now

XMPP

Movim shares:

Our latest updates

Other Federated Social Media

Hamish Campbell shares:

A fluff view of current tech we need to compost

More on the bullshit that is W Social.

The Internet Review says it's:

Time for Another Bluesky Vibe Check (and Happy 10th Birthday, Mastodon!)

Stefan Bohacek shares:

Latinsky and Medsky, brought to you by Blacksky's Acorn system, coming VERY soon

Daniel's Leaflets asks:

Permissioned Data Diary 5: What’s in a Name?

Charlotte Som has:

Plox: lazy-trust verifiable, on-PDS bulk did:plc operation archival

Democracy Tech

The Waving Cat announces:

New publication: The Little Book of Public Interest Technology

Bert Hubert reviews:

The First Democratic Tech Alliance Assembly

eMail / Newsletters

The Verge reports:

Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax

Note it's not the Nazi bar aspect, it's the fees. 😱 Fuck Substack. And its users.

Applied Cartography looks at:

LLMs and Buttondown

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or Surf 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

It's Time to Savor the Flavours of Bonfire

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:16:19 +0000

This article explores Bonfire Flavours, the platform’s starter apps targeted to specific types of communities. It originally appeared on The Fulcrum's official website.

In the May 8, 2026 The Programmers Fulcrum we announced the beginning of development work on our Manade project with a co-op. It will be built on the Bonfire platform and you will hear more about it over the coming months, starting today.

Manade will function as an opinionated (blueprint, template, example, starter-kit, etc.) instance for communities to (hopefully) get a quick and easy installation of Bonfire up and running. They can then customize it to meet their needs and goals.

Our goal is to have something you can build off of in 2027.

Bonfire is aimed at communities and can permit completely private instances. This is what Manade will be. It's not for the masses. That's what Fediverse platforms like Mastodon or ATProto ones like Eurosky, Blacksky, Northsky, etc. are built for. At the same time any Bonfire instance will be a community, not a silo. There are differences of opinions in communities.

If you think of public instances as pubs, you can think of Bonfire instances as clubs. But not the rave type.🕺 One is open to the general public and the other requires a membership. And in turn that membership may have requirements.

A great aspect of Bonfire is that you can seamlessly migrate your entire social presence (including posts, follows, circles, and bookmarks) between instances with import tools and a migration dashboard.

Finally, if the community wants it (and the administrators allow it) you still have the option to interact with millions of users across Mastodon, PeerTube, Mobilizon, and the wider Fediverse using ActivityPub. When enabled, protocol bridges also connect you with the Atmosphere and beyond.

We want to provide a tool for future communities to support local individuals, groups, and alternative small businesses that take power away from extractive big capital, enshittifying big tech, and abusive big government. 🏴‍☠️ ⛓️‍💥 🛠️

Anyway, in this article we'll explore Bonfire Flavours.

What is a Bonfire Flavour?

As I wrote in Grab a seat at our Bonfire: the revolutionary community platform , Bonfire will eventually have multiple options for new installations. These apps called Flavours are a curated set of features, extensions, and default settings. Flavours are designed to suit particular styles of communities or their activities.

They are set during installation or via an instance’s configuration. However, they are just starting points. You can enable or disable Bonfire extensions. If you're hosting your own instance, you can even install other extensions not included in the flavour.

Flavours allow the adjustment of settings and the development of plugins to fit your community’s unique needs.

So, here are Bonfires flavours and the stage of development they are in:

Ember (which is basic and stable if you want to customize Bonfire)
Social (which is recommended and in Beta)
Open Science (Beta)
Community (which is in Alpha)
Coordination for teams (Alpha)
Cooperation for organizations, co-ops, or mutual aid groups (Prototype)
Federated Archives for the Federated Archives Alliance (Prototype)

As an example, the Social flavor would be similar to other Fediverse apps.

Since Manade's purpose is to support communities against techno feudalism and surveillance capitalism, our blueprint will use the Community flavour. Plus, a manade is a semi-wild herd of horses led by a gardian in the Camargue area in France.

Herd / community. Gardian / administrator. Get it.

The Community flavor features group spaces and collaborative moderation. Again, these are features unique to Bonfire.

The Flavours

Ember

This app is a minimal, privacy-focused flavour with only core features enabled. Ideal for individuals or small groups who want a lightweight, distraction-free experience, or who care most about privacy and simplicity. All the remaining flavors will have Ember's capabilities.

Social

This app will be familiar to most social network users. While similar to Mastodon or other Fediverse microblogging platforms (posts, follows, etc.) it also has circles, boundaries, and groups. In addition, it supports long-form blogging, both public and private posts, custom feeds, content warnings, and rich privacy and security controls.

Bonfire Social is also your gateway into the Fediverse while staying self-hostable and community-governed.

Features

Let's explore the Social flavour's features.

Custom feeds allow users to filter and sort by content type, circle, date, engagement, source instance, and more. You can save presets and arrange them however you prefer.

Circles are lists of people (community friends, teams, mutual aid groups, etc.) with their own feed comprising posts from the circle members. Users create their circles. And they can only include members of the instance if desired.

Boundaries allow you to choose who can see, reply, quote, or even edit a post. For example a user could make a post public but accept replies only from a specific circle. Boundaries are compatible with GoToSocial interaction controls and Mastodon quote authorizations.

All of the Flavours below will have most of social's capabilities.

If you want to sample this familiar flavour, visit https://campground.bonfire.cafe.

Open Science

This app was created for researchers, academics, and open science communities. It was one of Bonfire's first projects and includes features for sharing publications and discussions around scientific work.

And it demonstrates the flexibility, customizing potential, and componentization capabilities of the platform. Thus, it has the most features out of the box.

Features

Users can federate with Mastodon and Bluesky and integrate their social graph with scholarly data. They can also transform any conversation into citable FAIR data with persistent identifiers.

Members can sign in with ORCID, Zenodo, or an institutional SSO. Publications, affiliations, and research interests can be imported directly from sources like ORCID and OpenAlex.

Posts and conversations may receive DOIs and become citable FAIR objects. Meaningful user exchanges can be preserved as part of the scholarly record (not lost in private threads) through integrations with a growing list of repositories.

Members can share papers and see them come alive where metadata, co-authors, datasets, and related works appear instantly. Colleagues can join the conversation no matter what platforms they use.

Finally, you may add repository connectors, peer review workflows, or research tools as your community evolves.

Sample this sophisticated flavour at https://sandbox.openscience.network.

Community

This app focuses on group collaboration and shared spaces. Ideal for neighbourhoods, clubs, or grassroots groups who want to organize, discuss, and make decisions together. Includes group spaces and importantly collective moderation.

The community flavour facilitates coordinated activities, topical discussions, and more nuanced governance structures. It includes Groups for flexible discussions and Topics for organized conversation. This capability promotes clarity and focus along with the flexibility to set specific visibility and permission levels.

Members can create public and private groups for wide-reaching discussions or confidential, selective conversations. This flexibility supports both inclusive community engagement and private interactions.

Users can also organize discussions in topics. This functionality allows categorization of discussions into distinct topics. It has the benefit of encouraging focused dialogue and easier navigation through group activities.

In addition, community members can create and assign roles in groups. This feature allows for personalized management of group dynamics and responsibilities. Role assignment enables tailored governance structures within communities, enhancing both organization and user experience.

The community flavour will allow Manade to have minimal moderation headaches, and maximum freedom from governmental regulations. Because it will be private and will only accept new members from existing member invitations. Preferably, it can require more than one member to invite someone to join. Of course, upon appeal admins will be able to add new members directly in order to avoid cliques and discrimination.

Coordination

This app is tailored for teams or networks that need to coordinate tasks, events, and shared goals. Features include task boards and collaborative decision-making tools.

So, it's perfect for ActivityPub developers. 😈

With federated Kanban boards and task management, this flavor can enhance team efficiency and empower individual users. Coordination uses the ValueFlows open economic vocabulary, offering the potential to foster decentralized and cooperative workflows.

Cooperation

This app is for communities requiring co-operative tools. It too uses the ValueFlows open economic vocabulary.

Members can manage and share resources. And this flavour supports more complex governance and tools for managing collective assets, production, and exchange.

Again, it's just a prototype for now.

Federated Archive Alliance

This app connects and empowers public media archives worldwide. It enables archives to maintain autonomy while participating in a collaborative network. The flavour also allows their collections to be discoverable and accessible across the Fediverse.

It facilitates seamless sharing of movie catalogs between participating archives, with granular permission controls that respect each organization's policies.

Curators, researchers, and other authorized members can search across the federated network, create curated collections, and contribute to the curation of metadata. All while preserving the provenance of each item.

It's also just a prototype.

How do you choose a flavour?

When joining Bonfire, users choose an instance with a flavour that fits their individual needs. So, this is an important decision that merits some research. You can always migrate, but it's better to start with an instance where you will feel comfortable.

For a new community an instance's flavour determines which extensions are enabled by default. But administrators can always add or remove extensions later. Again, they can switch flavours or customize the instance at any time.

Wrapping it up

As you have seen, Flavours make it easy to get started with the right set of tools for your community. You don’t need to be an expert to launch a Bonfire instance that fits your goals. And we hope our Manade project will provide some guidance and an easier launch process for your community.

Like the Bonfire platform itself, Flavours are incredibly flexible, customizable, and extensible.

Choose one that will let you savor the satisfying and nourishing banquet your community will provide.

Thanks for reading and start a bonfire today.

P.S.

Too learn more about Bonfire, read our article Grab a seat at our Bonfire: the revolutionary community platform .

You can also explore TAM and OMN tools for potential Bonfire workflows.

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 08 May, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 09 May 2026 10:16:58 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

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

It's your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism.

There is a lot of coverage of the shitshow that is ShitHub this week. And that makes me so happy I moved to Codeberg several years ago.

Our CSS section is full as well, which also makes us happy.

FYI, we officially began development work on our Manade project this week with a co-op. It's on the Bonfire platform and you will hear more about it over the coming months. I hope to have something you can build off of in 2027.

As usual, we aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening authoritarianism.

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.

Sites/Blogs/CMSs
Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools
OMN 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)

Eventuallymaking writes:

We could see a European digital identity taking shape, based on standards like interoperability (open formats), reversibility (the ability to easily retrieve one’s data), and the digital commons I mentioned earlier.

We could imagine conditions in public tenders that de facto eliminate US products.

Finally, we can imagine Europe becoming a hub for digital ethics, attracting global talent who want to contribute to projects serving the general interest rather than the stock price of a giant.

In short, open source is not a magic wand for Europe to stop being a digital colony. We will have to go further. This will require courageous public procurement, massive funding of digital commons, and strict legal protection against extraterritorial laws.

Why Open Source Won’t Be Enough to Free Us from Big Tech

Terry Godier writes:

The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it.

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

It was not demolished.

It was buried under a louder layer for a while.

Now the louder layer is thinning out.

You do not have to wait for someone to rebuild what you lost.

You are standing in it.

An essay about what persists: The Boring Internet

This is what we preach, promote, and practice every week.

CMSs

Agaric Coop shares:

Publish once in Drupal, Syndicate Everywhere

Starlightnet announces:

Makko 3.0 Beta

Flatpress has:

Happy 20th, FlatPress! A guest post by Edoardo Vacchi

Arnold Gamboa explains:

Why I Won't Build Your Website in WordPress (And What I Recommend Instead)

This is why WordPress, Drupal, etc. desperately need to de-clusterfuck-ify. Unfortunately, because of AI, it’s not going to happen.

See:

Matt Mullenweg Assembles Trusted Group to Overhaul WordPress.org and Five for the Future

Simon Reeps shares:

Some new Faircamp development insights

Ghost

First Draft Media shares:

Ghost now comes with RTL newsletter support!

A Whole Lotta Nothing is:

Announcing Social Comments for Ghost

Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki explains:

AI deploys software. It doesn't operate it.

Yet another reason not to use AI in the first place.

Build Awesome

Kitty Giraudel explores:

Optimizing Images with Eleventy on Netlify

Micro.blog

Manton Reece announces:

Major new version of Inkwell for Mac

Tools

MNT shares its:

MNT April 2026 Update

Great news and a good hardware company. I just bought a monitor from them to send some money their way until I need my next Linux computer.

Chat

DeltaChat announces:

The sovtechfund is investing nearly €500K into chatmail

Browsers

Brian Kardell examines:

Browsers and Language Features

Polypane announces:

Polypane 29: New network panel, snippet store and Chromium 148

RasterWeb! says:

Firefox is out, LibreWolf is in!

Cloud

PixelUnion shows us:

Albums Without Limits: How Immich Lets You Organise and Share Your Photos Your Way

Writing

LibreOffice has:

LibreOffice project and community recap: April 2026

Twenty Years On, ODF Is Still the Only Open Standard for Office Documents, and the Only One Governments Can Trust

Thank you, on behalf of ODF

Announcing the new LibreOffice website!

XWIKI shares:

Webinar overview: Meet CryptPad, the open-source alternative to mainstream office suites

Creative

Subvert announces:

May 12, We Launch Together.

For you musicians out there.

9to5Linux reports:

Inkscape 1.4.4 SVG Editor Released with a New Palette, Performance Improvements

Linux/Open Android

Open Source Musings shares a:

Quick Tip: Add Web Apps to Your Desktop with GNOME Web

Very useful, if you can get GNOME Web installed.

Ubuntu looks at:

Permissions Prompting: A Deep Dive

It's FOSS shares:

7 Features I Like in Ptyxis (The New Default Ubuntu Terminal)

Phosh has its:

Development News April 2026

PostmarketOS is:

Switching from pbsplash to Plymouth

The Register reports:

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

9to5Linux reports:

Calibre 9.8 E-Book Manager Improves Content Server, Native TTS Engine, and More

Hosting / Serving

./techtipsy shows us:

How I self-host this blog at home with a dynamic IPv4 address, IPv6 prefix, and a dash of Wireguard

Local First

Bruno Croci explores:

A local-first sync setup for a markdown-based feed reader

This week's featured OMN tool

Harper

Harper is a solid and free grammar checker that respects your privacy.

Harper

Programming

Matthew Tift advocates:

Caring about Software, Caring about People

This is worthy of being a featured article. So, please read it.

That HTML Blog shares:

The Best Introduction Guide to SVG You Will Read

It's FOSS reports:

Typical Microsoft! Turns Out VS Code Was Adding Copilot as a Git Co-Author Without Telling Anyone

Please use V.S. Codium if you have to go this route. Which hopefully you don’t. And fuck Microslop. See below.

Git

Bookstack announces:

BookStack Has Migrated From GitHub to Codeberg

Chris Smith is:

Migrating from GitHub to Forgejo

It's FOSS reports:

Go Away Microsoft! The Netherlands is Quietly Building Its Own GitHub Replacement

Vito Satori reflects:

On Leaving GitHub

Matthew Lang is:

Moving on from GitHub

Why Not Hugo muses:

On GitHub's downfall

Matt Duggan shares:

If I Could Make My Own GitHub

Andrew Nesbit dreams of:

A GitHub for maintainers

Armin Ronacher examines:

Before GitHub

Martin Hafskjold Thoresen explains:

Git Out

If you haven’t got the hint yet, you should say fuck off to ShitHub.

Here’s how:

A Programmer's Guide to Leaving GitHub

Markdown

Thought Asylum looks at:

Fixing Up My Markdown

Odd Evan explores:

Looking for feedback: Chat Transcripts in Markdown

Great site name.

HTML

Jim Nielsen has a good:

Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions

CSS

Mozilla looks at the:

content-visibility CSS property

Polypane explores:

Using safe-area-inset to build mobile-safe layouts

Julia Evans shares:

Links to CSS colour palettes

Khoa's Space examines:

Teeny-tiny Notes

A cute little effect.

CSS Tricks looks at:

Fixed-Height Cards: More Fragile Than They Look

Interesting, but I largely agree with "Most of the time, letting the browser handle the sizing leads to a more resilient result."

Making Zigzag CSS Layouts With a Grid + Transform Trick

Frontend Masters explains:

CSS n of Selectors for Conditional Validation

A little help with everyone's favorite, web forms. ;)

Web Components

Will Browar leaves Tailwind and Nuxt:

Refactor: Kids Money

Really great stuff.

Evil Martians moves:

From React to native web with nanotags: a migration that saved 100 KB

Aaron Gustafson explores:

Visual Validation Feedback for Form Fields

JavaScript

Ujjwal Sharma asks:

What even is Ecma? (Part 1)

Jxself examines:

Shifting the JavaScript Trap

ESLint announces:

ESLint v10.3.0 released

FirtDev promotes their:

Vanilla Web Book

This looks like a great resource.

AI

Hidde's Blog asks:

Open web vs AI: what can W3C do?

The push notifications idea should definitely be explored.

Linear notes:

Output isn’t design

So true. And the same goes for programming.

Other

Slint shares:

Servo with Slint Update: Windows Support

This week's featured programming tool

Pears

Unleash the Power of P2P. Empower Developers, Disrupt the Norm!

Pears

ActivityPub

Evan Prodromou says:

Check out "movies.pub"

ActivityPub for WordPress shares:

Radical Speed Month — The Reader Meets the Fediverse

I really wish Ghost was moving forward at this pace.

CybersecKyle demonstrates:

Automating Blog Posts to Mastodon From My Website

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Tangled

Kidding, this is not actually ActivityPub but an ATProto equilvalent.

Tangled is the next-generation social coding platform built with ATProto.

Tangled

Fediverse

Hamish Campbell has this analysis:

The Meta-Mess of the “Open” Social Web

Spot on. And it's why we are working on our Manade project in addition to our work here. You need to walk the talk so to speak.

Join the Fediverse announces:

Join the fediverse! zine

FediLabs has:

Settings in Fedilab have been reworked to improve the UX

UntrackMe 2.0 will be available soon

Ideally you would avoid most of these sites to begin with.

Holos announces:

A new version of Holos has been released

I like it so far. But, it's definitely a work in progress.

Mastodon announces:

Mastodon's first ever Discovery Week is just a few days away.

Friendica announces:

Friendica 2026.04 release candidate

And NodeBB shares:

NodeBB v4.11.0 Release Notes

Connected Places has:

Federation Has a European Legal Problem

Judges are nearly as incompetent as politicians when it comes to tech.

FR 161 – Conference Edition

Solid coverage of two events.

Phoenix Paulina Schmid looks at:

The Glass Floor of Digital Sovereignty

Betula announces:

Version 1.7.0

And Pachli announces.

Pachli 3.6.1 released

I just downloaded it to my de-googled phone and will check this Mastodon client out.

Bonfire

Bonfire shares:

Our Fediforum demo is up!

If you are interested in our Manade project, give it a view.

Silverpill explores the:

Fediverse & P2P

LibreSolutions examines:

Fungible Digital Infrastructure for bottom-up resilience and censorship resistance

Monospace Mentor is:

Going back to the roots for our community chat

It’s In My Head says:

Decentralize your communication

If you are looking for a Matrix instance, this might meet your needs.

Bakelight and Roses asks:

Do webrings work?

Let's hope so. I just added two to our footer.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation shows us:

A Bridge to Somewhere: How to Link Your Mastodon, Bluesky, or Other Federated Accounts

Web Mentions

Matthias Ott announces:

Buckle Up: Webmention plugin for Craft CMS version 1.3.0

RSS

Michael Barrett shows us how to:

Make a RSS app

NetNewsWire announces:

NetNewsWire Now Getting Feed Images from RSS

Andre Franca show us:

How to style a Hugo Atom feed with XSL

Susam Pal moves:

From RSS to Atom

Terence Eden notes:

RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google

Other Federated Social Media

Fitz Thiar opines:

WordPress Social? I don’t get it!

BTW, this is neither Tumblr or ActivityPub for WordPress. ???

Elena Rossini reports:

W Social uncovered: the reality behind the hype

In effect it's a corporate, somewhat suss Eurosky clone.

TechCrunch reports:

As X shuts down Communities, Acorn debuts an alternative that puts creators in control

This looks like ATProto's version of Bonfire. And it's a hell of a lot easier to setup. And cheaper. Though less customizable.

Another similar project (but for cities) and built on ATProto is:

Roundabout

Anuj Ahooja is:

Introducing Disperse: A Share Sheet for the Atmosphere

Noah Bogart looks at:

Bluesky Comments

Democracy Tech

Decidim announces:

Decidim Fest 2026 Save The Date & Internal Regulations

eMail / Newsletters

Buttondown muses on:

What email will look like in the future

And has:

Simplified email address settings

Should we bring back email exploders?

This is a terrific history lesson.

Toni Notes notes:

A newsletter should extend a publication, not duplicate it

Good advise for professional publications but a little overkill for personal ones, IMHO.

Kevin Quirk shares:

My Inital Thoughts On Thunderbird Pro

Ghost introduces:

Saved member views

CTAs

That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
Follow us on Flipboard or Surf 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

Consider this Ethical Publishing Stack and Workflow for your Site, Blog, or Newsletter

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:27:16 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

I published an article on Symfony Station (now sunset) years ago, titled Need a Writing Stack and Workflow for a Tech Newsletter or Blog?.

It did not concern Symfony or PHP directly. However, it was still related. We wanted to be the best source for news on the two topics. But, for that to happen, people other than us needed to produce items worthy of coverage.

Giving Back

Our mission was not only to cover Symfony and PHP. We also served their respective developer communities. One way to do that was to help more developers write about Symfony and PHP.

So, we did. Now, I want expand this effort to my work with The Fulcrum.

If you are reading this article, you are interested in technical topics as well as things like freedom and democracy. You might even publish a newsletter and / or articles covering them. If so, we created this resource for you. If you don’t, we hope you will start soon. It is a way to give back to the community that helped make you successful. And that applies no matter the subject.

Our site, our weekly newsletter / post, and this article are ways we give back. And the recommendations in this article could apply to any newsletter or blog.

Of course, with Symfony Station we promoted ethical development. With The Fulcrum we are even more focused on ethics.

Over the years, we’ve experimented with a variety of tools. And more importantly, we’ve developed a stack that works. And it’s an ethics-focused stack.

Taking Back

I think it’s important for us as humans to create within Open Social, the Open Web, the Small Web, the IndieWeb, and the Open Media Network.

We need to use the tools mentioned in the Techno Anarchist Manifesto and follow strategies like POSSE, KISS, and the 4 Opens.

Why? We need to fight techno feudalism and techno fascism. FYI, I call the solution I propose to combat autocracy and Techno Feudalism, Techno Anarchism. Hence, the manifesto linked to above.

Our goal should be to destroy autocracy rather than protect democracy. Simply because most of us live in autocracies unfortunately.

Still, we fortunate ones must both reform democracy and neuter it’s biggest threat, Big Tech.

Also, we are against the perversion of society by oligarchs. Fuck 'em. That's obvious.

To quote the philosophical father of Anarchism, Michel Proudhon: he wanted "no government by men by means of the accumulation of power (autocracy) and no exploitation of men by means of the accumulation of capital (oligarchy)."

As supporters of democracy we need to engage in a positive fight against this timeline’s bullshit in a manner we can control ourselves.

If we do this we can improve ourselves, our lives, and our societies. And creating with Open Social, the Open Web, the Small Web, the IndieWeb, and the OMN is a great way to start.

Anyway, enough of morality, let’s move on to the post.

Dedication

Consistency is paramount for publishing. Quality writing takes hard work in addition to talent. So, you have to be committed.

It would help if you published weekly or monthly but not randomly. If you aren’t sure about your dedication or have limited time, begin with the monthly route. See if it works for you in the long run. Are you ambitious and passionate about your topic? Is your financial situation secure? Do you have free time? If so, then go for it each week.

Obviously, this rules out any AI horseshit.

Efficient Solutions

The solutions you select for your stack should have desktop and mobile apps. You’ll want to be able to work when and where inspiration strikes.

For example, I improved upon the title for the original Symfony Station article while at a music festival. And then again when walking my dogter. 🐕

Now, the format we’ll use for the following solutions is:

the recommended one(s)
why you should use it / them
other quality options

We will recommended tools for:

curation
saving / organizing ideas
writing
publishing
distributing
and sharing

Curate ideas and items to cover with:

In addition to your knowledge and experience you will need to curate information from others to write intelligently about any subject. So, let's look at some sources.

Newsletters

The highest quality of source materials comes from niche newsletters. It makes sense because their publishers are committed and take pride in their efforts. They are more likely to be professionally written and factual as well.

Obviously, you want those written by humans. Fuck AI.

RSS

And of course newsletters' close cousins, blogs with RSS feeds are the second best source for curation.

Aggregators

Aggregators are a good way to discover shareable blog posts. Look at:

Fediverse

We joined originally joined joined the Fediverse via Mastodon and even moved between instances. I still find it more civil and enjoyable than the alternatives. But, it’s not perfect of course.

This site federates directly to the Fediverse and you can follow us at thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev.

So, find a community that complements your topic and get social with it. It is a great place to run ideas off other people or even discover a tangental topic you weren't aware of.

In addition to Mastodon, there are many other Fediverse platforms:

PixelFed
Loops
PeerTube
Bonfire
Friendica
GoToSocial
PieFed
NodeBB
Holos
Akkoma
and lots more

Federation also includes websites. Again this Ghost site is federated. And WordPress is easily federatable as well. Other site platforms like Write Freely and MicroBlog are federational options.

Fediverse Forums

Forums aren’t my thing, but they can be a good source as well. This is especially true for niche topics.

Federated ones include:

NodeBB
Mbin
PieFed
Lemmy

I recommend Mbin. And fuck Slack and Discord.

Flipboard and Surf

One of the beter curation sources for us is Flipboard. The magazine-based platform provides content on a wide range of topics. It’s helpful for more than just curation, as you will see below.

Plus, it now has a Fediverse, RSS, ATProto feed client as well, called Surf.

You can follow us on the "The Fulcrum: Coding for Democracy and the OMN" Flipboard magazine.

And / or follow our Surf feed as well.

Semi-Federated Open Social

ATProtocol is a open social protocol alternative to the Fediverse’s Activity Pub. It was built by the rapidly enshittifying Bluesky with VC money. But ATProto is open source and has potential. Alternatives like Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky, Gander, and a few others exist. There are lots of tools being built as well. So, check it out if interested.

You can follow us on Eurosky, although we post and interact sporatically there.

We prefer the more anarchic, punk rock, spiky Fediverse and ActivityPub. 🏴‍☠️

Websites

Using sites you admire for curation is a no-brainer. However, it is easier to curate from their newsletters, RSS feeds, and social media content.

Save to:

While curating for your upcoming issues or articles, you need a place to store source material.

Flipboard

We use Flipboard for several reasons.

Since it’s also a great source, you can kill two fascists with one bullet by creating a magazine and sharing the sources there. You can pull all your items from this central location when you are ready to write.

You have the added advantage of using Flipboard for promoting your wisdom.

It’s fantastic for the distribution of your final products as well.

You can gain followers that can also join your newsletter.

And ones to follow you on the open social.

Additional

While the following tools aren’t as efficient, but if you already use them, have at it. They are note taking apps.

If you are a team or a power user, try a tool like Obsidian. If you're an individual, Joplin is a better choice.

Write with:

Obsidian

Because Obsidian uses Markdown, we started using it as a note app that could be used on any operating system or device and synced between them. We used it mostly for our Symfony Station communiques.

Obsidian stores notes on your devices, so you can access them quickly, even offline. With hundreds of plugins and themes, you can shape Obsidian to your workflow. It uses open, non-proprietary files, so you're aren't locked in and can preserve your data for the long term. Migrate it when and where you will.

Still, it’s not open source.

Joplin

As of 2025 we moved on to using Joplin which is also Markdown-based. Obsidian was overkill for us. Plus, Joplin is open source. And it’s basically the same thing with most of the same capabilities.

Additional

A reasonable fallback that lets you collaborate easily with others is LibreOffice.

Tools

The following two tools will help make your writing professional.

Grammar

To be taken seriously, your content must be grammatically correct. We recommend using Grammarly. Check it out. The tool is handy if you are writing in a second language.

Plus, it is Ukrainian in origin. If you didn’t know, we support Ukraine.

Readability

To make your content readable, use the Hemingway App. Ernest was one of the first writers to recognize that writing simply is writing beautifully. And it’s much more effective.

While you should use these tools, note that it’s essential that you do not follow 100 percent of their recommendations. You still want your writing to reflect your unique voice and personality.

Do not use pure AI. Unless you want to sound like and be viewed as a clueless tech bro.

Publish to:

Unless you only want a newsletter, you need a home for your content and promoting your email list.

And it should be one you own. Preferably, you’ll choose an open source one. So fuck Facebook, WIX, Squarespace, and their ilk.

We prefer Static Sites (SSG) with non-database, flat file, folder-based storage. And I recommend open source ones in particular. They best follow the Techno Anarchist ethic. Examples follow.

Grav CMS

If you are more of a developer, consider Grav CMS. We ran Symfony Station off it and loved it.

From simple to sophisticated you can build faster websites with Grav, a modern open source flat-file CMS.

Publii

Publii is another sold option. We run a personal site for friends and family on it.

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

If you absolutely need a database consider:

WordPress

Are you are more of a content creator or designer? You can use WordPress. Its block-based approach easy to operate. Plus, your can easily run a newsletter and Fediverse account from it.

Many people don’t know there are two options for the CMS.

WordPress.org is for those who want to self-host. And that means paying for hosting from solutions such as Siteground or Kinsta. It means more admin work but gives you the freedom to do what you want. We use 1984 Hosting for The Fulcrum's backup site which is also federated.
WordPress.com is for non-technical users who want automated administration after setup. It can even be free. But it's a corporate version of WordPress with all that entails.

Ghost

You should also explore Ghost. You can also run a newsletter and Fediverse account from it. Plus, it’s easy to monetize your content. So again, fuck Substack.

We run this site on Ghost.

Build Awesome

Eleventy (11ty) is becoming Build Awesome in a few days.

It's a slightly simple static site generator that is JavaScript-based. And quite popular.

Additional

For simple or personal sites (what some call the Small Web) consider:

Codeberg Sites
Flatpress
Neocities
Bear
Leaflet (ATProtocol-based)
WriteAs
Microblog
And other simpler or more complicated SSGs.

Distribute to:

You can syndicate your articles and other content to other platforms to do more good with your advocacy and knowledge sharing.

For example we use:

the backup WordPress site mentioned above
a Bear blog
a Leaflet blog
Dev.to
the Flipboard magazine mentioned above
the Surf feed mentioned above

All have canonical links back to the original article / post on our website.

As noted, WordPress has great newsletter options. But they aren’t simple.

Ghost is an option if you want to rent rather than own and want fewer administration headaches. Although, you can self-host.

Buttondown is another open source option.

Casting

For articles and interviews, audio is a solid option. We recommend PeerTube for podcasts. Peertube is federated also.

Check out the federated Owncast for streaming.

Share to:

Share the wealth by sharing your knowledge. Again, it’s a way to increase the reach of your advocacy and drive traffic to your site. And help more people in turn. And the same applies to adding subscribers to your newsletter and friends on open social.

Flipboard / Surf

As mentioned above, Flipboard is an excellent place for readers to find your wisdom on particular topics. If you want more of a feed than curated magazine, try Surf. They're both a great place to share.

Open Social Media

We love Mastodon, and get at least 10 times the interactions we got on Shitter. But, any federated open source platform is better than supporting fascist, commercial, and siloed social media.

It has the added benefit of not seeing yourself reincarnated as a cockroach.

RSS

If you have a website, it should have a RSS feed available. Period.

Additional

You can repurpose and share your efforts in other formats like video, podcasts, newsletters, books, etc. And then share it with the related tools we mentioned in this article.

Summing it up

So, you can start to see what's possible for your efforts to better us and our planet.

By using the stack of tools we recommend you can increase the efficiency of your publishing process. It can save you hours on your time-intensive labor of love. Plus, it allows you to concentrate on the important part, thinking and writing.

But, it's also important for it to be read. So, also use a newsletter, RSS, non-canonical syndication on other platforms, and open social tools.

And most importantly, by doing so you will be inspiring and helping more people with your increased output of wisdom.

Your curating, saving, writing, publishing, distributing, and sharing platforms might be different based on your topics.

But, our stack is:

Find items to cover in / on newsletters, Flipboard / Surf, aggregators, RSS, and open social media.
Save your items to a Flipboard magazine or Joplin until you are ready to write.
Write your content with Joplin.
Publish it to a site.
Distribute via your newsletter, RSS, and other web platforms.
Share to Flipboard / Surf, the Fediverse, and / or other social media.
Repeat daily.

So, check these stack tools out. We hope you will experiment with them and integrate them into your workflow. Doing so will breathe new life into your publishing and advocacy efforts!

Thanks for reading, and happy publishing!

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 24 April, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:02:14 +0000

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

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

It's your weekly curation 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.

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.

Sites/Blogs/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)

Coding.Social writes:

The ActivityPub fediverse is doing great, right?

But do you know the extent to which the fediverse installed base has strayed from the promise and power contained in the open standards documents?

And that it constrains itself ever further into limited application areas, a self-inflicted narrow straitjacket, if we allow this standards divergence to continue?

Did you also know that it is essentially only two (!!) people who are the pillars that try to uphold the entire grassroots standardization process, both volunteers?

We MUST improve our standardization practices to assure a healthy future for the fediverse social network.

Grassroots fediverse evolution

Enjoy this one slowly and do some deep thinking.

Smashing Frames writes:

Our world is built around technological infrastructures that define what we see, who we can talk to, and what information gets presented to us.

We also live in a time of growing fascist threats all over the planet: Many countries have neofascist movements and parties trying to gain power and potentially even get conservative parties to include them in governments. Some even have had success. Fascism is back with a vengeance.

I want to analyze the relationship of fascism and what is called “AI” these days. Is this “technology” that keeps being used to reshape the world around us (for better or worse but dominantly worse) in some way connected to fascism?

AI as a Fascist Artifact

Molily writes:

This post describes my personal approach to software development. It highlights different aspects that are not strongly connected but all affected by generative AI – a topic I’m not particularly keen on writing about, but here we are.

The Power of Understanding

Open Media Network - Site/Blog/CMS

Rose Dreams explores:

Indie Web for Artists Who Refuse the Feed

Own Your Web has:

Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators

Consider subscribing to this newsletter.

And as you know, curation is the main thing we do here.

RedBeanIceCream says:

You Don't Need a Tech Stack. You Just Need a Text Editor.

This is a little bare bones even for me.

Patrick Weaver examines:

Building a Web Page That Edits Itself

Bludit shares its:

API Introduction

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Native share buttons

Magic Pages announces:

Private RSS Feeds for Your Members

This is a pro member feature.

How to run Magic Pages backups in a local Ghost environment

Build Awesome

Tom MacWright explores:

Eleventy

Eleventy announces:

Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement

Ryan Gittings looks at:

Speeding Up Large 11ty Builds on Netlify

The Tooth goes from:

From HTML to Eleventy

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Jan Wilderboer explores:

Hello Digital Autonomy

Open Source Security says:

Open source was never about trust

Heisse reports:

Paying without Google: New consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles

Nextcloud looks at:

Euro-Office: License compliance and what open source means

F-Droid explores:

Exploring Sustainable Funding for Free Software

Chat

Signal has:

Signal is working on screen sharing on mobile

Phishing attempts on Signal – How they work and how to protect yourself

Apple fixes iOS vulnerability exposing Signal notifications

Browsers

Kevin Boone is:

Announcing Caztor 1.0 – a browser for small-net protocols like Gemini and Gopher

Waterfox announces:

6.6.12 - Security fixes and ad blocker improvements

Cloud

Nextcloud has:

Nextcloud AIO usability updates: Easy management of your apps and containers

Euro-Office: Building momentum

Creative

GIMP announces:

GIMP 3.2.4 Released

9to5Linux reports:

GIMP 3.2.4 Improves Text and Crop Tools, PDF Export, PSD Import, and More

The Document Foundation examines:

Using LibreOffice for writing screenplays

Linux/Open Android

Phoronix reports:

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Now Available & Powered By Linux 7.0

Pure OS shares its:

PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2026

Ruben De Smet has:

My Sailfish OS Journey

My Sailfish OS Journey: Apps for my daily needs

Bon prenom. ;)

Hosting / Serving

Kevin Boone looks at:

Self-hosting and steamrollers in the small net

This week's featured OMN tool

Framatoolbox

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

Framatoolbox

OMN Programming

404 Media reports:

This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright

It’s FOSS reports:

21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug!

That's inspirational. And awesome.

Geri Reid opines:

Making product documentation work for humans and AI

Git

ShitHub shares:

Highlights from Git 2.54

Tom Ootes announces:

We gaan samen code.overheid.nl bouwen

Markdown

Interconnected announces:

Mist is now open source and looking for interop

CSS Tricks has:

Markdown + Astro = ❤️

Enhancing Astro With a Markdown Component

Sune Vuorela announces:

Kookbook 0.3.0 released

HTML

That HTML Blog explores:

Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags

Piccalilli examines:

The end of responsive images

Interesting, though very extensive.

Frontend Masters says:

The Web Is Fun Again: First Experiments with HTML in Canvas

Web Components

Aaron Gustafson shows us:

Never Lose Form Progress Again

JavaScript

Thibolt shows us how to:

Never Lose Form Progress Again

Frontend Master notes:

AI-Generated UI Is Inaccessible by Default

Just use HTML. Correctly.

AI

Aram Zucker-Scharff says:

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

Where’s Your Ed says:

I Will Never Respect A Website

Solid take.

Flying Penguin has:

The Boy That Cried Mythos: Verification is Collapsing Trust in Anthropic

Other

XWIKI shares:

XWiki SAS Q1 2026 updates: new features, improvements, and what’s next

I was excited to see the Nextcloud Cristals extension announcement.

This week's featured programming tool

Twig

Twig is the fast, flexible, and secure modern template engine for PHP.

Twig

ActivityPub

Fedify looks at:

Building a federated blog

Cool. I might give it a shot.

Philip Norton releases:

The alpha1 version of my Drupal Mastodon API module

Ben Pate announces:

Activity Intents are now supported (or soon to be) by the biggest Fediverse apps out there

James Endres Howell explores:

Embedding a Mastodon thread as comments to a blog post

ActivityPub for WordPress has:

8.1.0 — By the Numbers

Good stuff, especially on the API front. I will have to see if it works on Ivory.

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Emissary

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

Emissary

Fediverse

The Electronic Frontier Foundation shares:

Holos announces:

HolosSocial 1.4.0 is available

Sebastiaan Ammerlaan has:

Voorbeeldbrief Fediverse

Sadly, I can only scrape by in Romance languages. So, this is a translated link for an important idea.

Connected Places says:

FR160 – Everyone Wants Servers And Nobody Wants Servers

The main lesson here is not to be on Bluesky or Mastodon.Social.

Bonfire

Bonfire announces:

Ss part of the Nina Festival, we're hosting a workshop to think with Bonfire

Element says:

Digital sovereignty is built on an open standard that enables federation

That's a great graphic.

RSS

Ryan Charles shares a:

RSS Anyway Preview: Subscribe to Anything on the Internet

Other Federated Social Media

Chunky Guys announces:

When Bluesky goes down, we go down. That needs to change.

Underreacted has:

ATProto made simple: publishing lexicons

Atmosphere Community announces:

New blog and first release of Atmosphere Community

Stefan Bohacek announces:

Fediverse Friend Finder

eMail / Newsletters

Buttondown has a great history story:

The US government tried really hard to screw up email

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: 17 April, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:42:12 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

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.

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.

Sites/Blogs/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)

Jan Wildeboer has:

Conway: Think Networks First, Actors Second

Or why we need to work together to find the right language, terms, tools to understand what is happening and how to fix it in better ways. Together, not as lone geniuses.

It’s an invitation to think and discuss. To agree on a framework to help us all progress, The Open Way.

Alexi asks us to:

Go create a website, start blogging, sign up to an independent forum, maybe create your own forum, or support those that do any of the above. Of course this is a bit of an ask, you'll have to learn quite a few things if you are intending to run something of your own, but my goal isn't to convince everyone.

I am just trying to convince some people to help their community local or not and to eventually help the independent web thrive.

More of the internet has to be independently run again if we want to stand any chance of regaining what we've lost. Create a space that you own, where you can display what you want, how you want. Link it up to other people using webrings and buttons. Just have fun!

openweb.md

Great advice.

Conjure Utopia has a review:

Cables of Resistance: the numbers don't add up

In a good way!

Open Media Network - Site/Blog/CMS

Joost de Valk opines:

Defending the open web is not enough

Personally, I view the Small Web, Indie Web, TAM, and OMN as Foundationesque efforts for a future after the techno fall or similar to the role of Islamic scholars preserving the knowledge that allowed the renaissance. The hard part will be open hardware. And electricity.

Speaking of, DevShrine explores:

Surfing the IndieWeb in 2026

Pika announces:

Micropub API with iA Writer and Drafts Support

PureBlog explores:

Ignoring Files During Updates

Jim Nielsen shares:

Fewer Computers, Fewer Problems: Going Local With Builds & Deployments

This is DIY. :)

I ran across Faircamp this week:

Surfing the IndieWeb in 2026

If you are a muscian or band with recordings you may want to check into it.

Bear

Field Notes examines:

Integrating Bubbles with BearBlog

Here’s how to add it universally:

Embed the Bubbles vote count

Ghost

Murat Corlu built the:

Ghost Theme Editor

Useful.

Right on cue Magic Pages announces:

Edit your theme directly in Ghost Admin

Although, it looks like you have to upgrade from the Starter to Pro plan to use this (as you will now have a "custom theme"). Disappointing.

Publii

Matt Sayar explains:

Cutting GitHub from my site's deployment workflow

Micro.blog

MicroBlog announces:

Micro.blog 3.6.6 for iOS

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

France announces:

Souveraineté numérique : l'État accélère la réduction de ses dépendances extra-européennes

The Guardian reports:

Now you can break up with big tech at a bar: ‘cybersecurity disguised as a party’

The Open Shelf reports:

Amazon Is Cutting Kindle Store Access on Pre-2013 Kindles. Your Device Isn’t Dead — Here’s How to Keep Reading.

Dries Buyaert asks:

What does 'Buy European' even mean?

Small Web

Here are a few curation resources I ran across recently:

ʕ-ᴥ-ʔ Bear Roll

Bear's Discovery feed

Bubbles

I found these via Kagi’s Small Web app which is a great source on its own.

Chat

XWIKI has a case study:

ChatEurope: trusted news via collaboration software and chatbot integration

Browsers

Servo announces:

Servo is now available on crates.io

Matt Smith reviews:

Kagi – a paid search engine that supports the small web

I have been using Kagi for search, translation, and browsing the small web for awhile. It's worth the small amount of money to remove a lot of bullshit from your life.

Mohamed Alashri says:

JSON formatting in browser is useful

Cloud

Nextcloud has:

Nextcloud Ethical AI rating: A transparent approach to privacy-first AI

Of course, you can be 1,000% private, ethical, and moral by not using it.

Dutch education system and municipalities strive for digital sovereignty

Tuta announces:

Tuta Drive launches in closed beta! A milestone in the development of Tuta’s post-quantum secure cloud.

Writing

Toni Notes notes:

A small publication needs an operating model, not just good posts

Creative

Scribus announces:

Scribus 1.7.3 Released

Scribus 1.6.6 Released

I just ran across this:

Ubuntu Studio

Linux/Open Android

Linux announces:

The 7.0 kernel has been released

Linuxiac reports:

FLX1s Meets the Big Screen

This is looking more and more likely to be my next phone.

Hackster reports:

MNT Research Brings the Open-Hardware Reform to a Whole New Form Factor: Ultra-Slim Desktops

And this could be my next "desktop".

9to5Linux reports:

Zorin OS 18.1 Boosts Windows App Support by 40%, Improves Window Tiling

Zorin is the distribution I use as it's the only one I've ever been able to install. It's on an old iMac.

Linux Mint Will Adopt a Longer Development Cycle Starting with Linux Mint 23

Linuxiac reports:

France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins

Tres, tres bon!

This week's featured OMN tool

Inkscape

Inkscape is a Free and open source vector graphics editor.

Inkscape

OMN Programming

Git

Schalk Neethling explores:

Pushing to GitHub and Codeberg Simultaneously with Git

Henry Catalini Smith examines:

Lessons learned from the Forgejo v15 release blocker

Speaking of, Forgejo announces:

Forgejo v15.0 is available

Markdown

Axolotl Thoughts looks at:

Personal wikis

HTML

Accessibility is Political has:

Old advice – Hiding Content Has No Effect on Accessible Name or Description Calculation

Squarespace Engineering shows us:

How To Use Standard HTML Video & Audio Lazy-Loading on the Web Today

CSS

Karl Koch explores:

On scroll-driven reveals

CSSence examines:

Animating emojis

Witty blog name.

CSS Tricks looks at:

7 View Transitions Recipes to Try

I like most of these. Of course, it may because I'm also a video editor.

Frontend Masters explores:

Building a UI Without Breakpoints

Webkit examines:

Name-only @container queries: a solution to the naming wars

Web Components

Mozilla looks:

Under the hood of MDN's new frontend

AKA reason 9,768 that React is absolute shit.

Schalk Neethling is:

Introducing masonry-gridlanes-wc: A Native-First Masonry Web Component

AI

The Komoy Noise Research Unit advises:

Antagonize yerself!

This is the same reason I went through the pain of coding bootcamp as a journalist/content creator.

NerdyDev explains:

Why AI Sucks At Front End

To be fair, most “programmers” suck at frontend and most frontend frameworks are shit. And AI’s building off the garbage it stole from them.

This week's featured programming tool

Pears

Unleash the Power of P2P.

Pears

ActivityPub

Ben Werdmuller notes::

One size fits none: let communities build for themselves

Yep.

Dominik Chrástecký opines:

ActivityPub: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

8.0.0 — Smash That Like Button

WordPress is making better progress on ActivityPub integration than Ghost is.

Ben W is:

Shipping v0.1.0 for bookwyrm.koplugin!

David Revoy explores:

Unified Vs Split-panels: experimenting with publishing digital comics on the Fediverse

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Platform 6

It's more of a resource this week, but Platform 6 supports crowdsourcing for co-operative development.

Platform 6

Fediverse

Hamish Campbell shares:

EU taking the open web path?

Paths and Patches announces:

Apps for Change: four flavours

This is a great service for non-profits and more organized communities.

Technically Good has:

A Blast from the Past: "Looks just aren't as Important Online as IRL"

Holos has:

Federation & Moderation Policy

Holos will update its E2EE model to align with the shared spec

FediLab announces:

E2EE is coming to the Fediverse. Every effort will be made for Fedilab to be among the first Android clients to support it.

Fedilab 3.38.1 has been published!

HolosDiscover now uses IFTAS denylists for moderation

Speaking of, IFTAS exposes:

Suspected Portal Kombat Accounts

Mastodon has:

Trunk & Tidbits, March 2026

Sovereign Tech Agency funding

90,000 of this will go to efforts with other ActivityPub platforms.

Connected Places has more:

FR159 – Sovereign Tech Agency funds Mastodon

Kelson Reviews Stuff reviews:

RSS Parrot

Matrix shares:

This Week in Matrix 2026-04-10

RSS

ReadBeanIceCream has:

Manage Your Own Attention with RSS

RSS Gets You Off the Platform; Curation Gets You Off the Drug

Matt Duggan notes:

You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026

Absolutely true.

Ale Hsu says:

Your RSS posts might only live half as long as everyone else's

Death and Gravity announce:

Reader 3.22 released – new web app

Other Federated Social Media

Euronews reports:

Eurosky: Europe aims to rival Big Tech with its own social media ecosystem

Eurosky is:

Introducing Portal

It's great that you no longer have to go through Bluesky!

Connected Places reports:

On ATProto's verification and coordination authority

Underreacted shares:

ATProto made simple: granular permissions

Steve Simkins examines:

Indexing Standard.site

A Warm Space explains:

page.parts dev log 1

Nick Gerakines is:

Introducing attested.network: Proof of Payment for ATProtocol

Steve Woodson looks at:

Adding Bluesky Activity to an Eleventy Blog

Democracy Tech

Free Knowledge has:

Democratic Technology: Building Alternatives to Techno-Authoritarianism

eMail / Newsletters

Ghost announces:

Welcome email design settings

Good stuff and we've updated ours.

Spectral Web Services is:

Introducing the newsletter digest builder!

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: 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.

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!

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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

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