DEV Community: Reuben Walker, Jr.

The OMN and the fight against the dotcons

The Programmer's Fulcrum 14 August, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:37:24 +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 Open Social 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 open social 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.

We are on holiday this week without a computer, so we’re missing some curation resources.

Featured Item(s)

Hamish Campbell writes:

If essential social information is available only through a private corporation, leaving that corporation becomes socially expensive. That’s exactly why we need a working, good UX’ open web-based reboot. Email still works. Websites still work. RSS still works. Federated media works, community archives could work. The technology exists, what is missing is the social infrastructure connecting these things together.

our behaviour matters, so while building real networked alternatives, lets focus on the opens path as security is not enough, survival is not victory. We can build technically secure systems that nobody wants to use. We can build ideologically pure communities that nobody outside the bubble can tolerate. Or we can build useful social infrastructure that helps real people communicate, organise, remember and act together.

Multi-Hyphenate1 explains:

How creatives and devs can all finally escape the control of the silicon valley of evil and make a trillion dollars

Wow! This is A LOT but, similar to what we promote. Set aside some time and read it. A unique voice for sure. :) They make a good point that while intelligent (technically), most devs are clueless fucks and just as lazy as all humans.

Unfortunately, we have an outsized impact on the world.

CMSs

Micro.blog is:

Introducing the Micro.blog PDS

Disappointingly, Publii announces:

We created the Markdown for AI plugin

Be sure not to install it.

Maurice Renk has a way to:

Follow Kirby Plugin Updates

IndieWeb

Venkatram Harish Belvadi explores:

Re-defining the IndieWeb: Focus on the philosophy, not on tools

Fantastic advise to not obsess on the definition.

Write.as / WriteFreely

WriteFreely announces:

Version 0.17.2

The ATL.social announces:

We now have a new service: WriteFreely

Great job, my (metro) home town.

Write.as announces:

We now show alt text in the fediverse!

Better late than never.

Tools

NLnet announces:

60 projects strenghtening the digital commons

They say: there is upcoming work on new internet protocols such as SCION, and the GNU Name System. And of course some web related work such as a proposed new CSP directive and continuation of the work on the Servo web browser. The privacy-enhancing browser extension SurfJS will instrument and replace privacy-sensitive JavaScript APIs with surrogate APIs. There are also some Fediverse-related tools (Fedipub, ActivityBot).

NiemanLab reports:

Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try

Ben Wermuller adds his thoughts:

Chicago's social network is a huge bet for news. I think it's the future.

Mother Jones has a review for a book written in 2000:

A Tech Prophet Finally Gets Her Second Coming

Christoph Hormann examines:

OpenStreetMap, business interests and capitalism

CoMaps is the way to go.

Internet Exchange shares:

Protocols: Power Hides in Boring Places

Chat / Team Chat

Signal is:

Introducing Automatic Key Verification

Trail of Bits explains:

How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of your Signal chats

About Signal reports:

Signal announces support for Linux ARM64 in beta

Signal Login: optional registration without a phone number will require a one-time payment

Chris Boscolo looks at:

ATSMS Group Chat: End-to-End Encryption Without the Lock-In

Browsers

Servo has:

Servo Report Week 31

CSS Grid is now enabled by default in Servo

Tres bon.

Search

Tuta shares:

Alternatives to Google search

Crislo has:

Ecosia und Qwant haben jetzt ihren eigenen Suchindex, und das ist tatsächlich eine Nachricht

Cloud

NextCloud announces:

Nextcloud passes Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) by SURF & Privacy Comp

Good news.

August maintenance updates: Nextcloud Hub 25 Autumn, 26 Winter & 26 Spring

Writing

LibreOffice examines:

Why and how the Austrian Military moved to LibreOffice (Part 1)

Why and how the Austrian Military moved to LibreOffice (Part 2)

Linux / Open Android

PostmarketOS announces:

device-pine64-pinephonepro: Switching to u-boot and systemd-boot

9to5Linux reports:

CachyOS ISO Release for August 2026 Improves the Installer, Desktop Profiles

Tuta reports:

Google prévoit de bloquer le side-loading comme Apple, déclarant la guerre à la liberté d'Android

e/OS Foundation announces:

Please welcome /e/OS 4.1.1!

This week's featured OMN tool

Bunny Fonts

Choose Privacy. Fuck Google and adopt Bunny Fonts.

Bunny Fonts

Programming

David Bushell says:

They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore

Pulsar is another good simple option for a code editor.

Markdown

iio shares:

iiomark: the markup on this webpage

HTML

W3C has:

Updated W3C Recommendation: ARIA in HTML

Adrian Roselli asks:

Should a Dialog Close When Clicked Outside?

Master. Dev shares:

Delayed-Then-Instant Tooltips with HTML & CSS Alone

CSS

And explores:

View Transitions: Careful Not To Make Stuff Unclickable

NerdyDev examines:

Scroll Axis Lock

AI

Terry Godier (admirably) says:

Mea Culpa - Dark Hours

Reason 12,036 that vibe-coding is horseshit.

Codemanship explains why:

AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say?

Cal Newport follows up:

On AI Coding and Its Discontents

On a related note, Brett Codes says:

I'm done using AI

And Stefan Koopmanschap has:

On AI (continued)

The 4Rs, peeps.

This week's featured programming tool

Web Components

Add interactivity to your projects.

Web Components

ActivityPub

Open Social Biz looks at:

The Right to Leave: How W3C's New LOLA Standard Aims to Solve Fediverse Account Migration

I missed this a few weeks ago.

Little Fedi launches:

A lightweight ActivityPub server

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Fediverse.info

This is the fediverse: social media run by the people on it.

Fediverse.info

Permanent aside here (unfortunately)

This is a perpetual pet peeve because many people aren't able to comprehend ⬇️:

The Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, formal, informal, or otherwise)
and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise).
and corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

So, recognize their natures and don't ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why we have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

FediLabs announces:

FediHood is now available

I built FediHood on the Mastodon API

If you want to set up an instance for Nazi cunts, PieFed shares:

What PieFed blocks out of the box – and how to unblock it

Bonfire

My Manade situation is not quite as dire as it was last week, so I am delaying the details post till next week.

Surf announces:

Version 1.0.447

ATProto

ATProto has:

Make the PDS Your Own: Customization and Metrics

Introducing Bluesky Protocol Services

Seeing their chance of monetizing their platform go down in flames, this is the first step towards monetizing the protocol. Which is fine.

Alex’s Blog adds:

We have killed the technical debt

Chris Pardy explores:

Adversarial Spaces

Atmosphere

Blacksky explains:

Blacksky Isn’t Just Another Bluesky. Here’s the Difference.

Elena Rossini asks:

Is anybody curious about how the W Social experiment is going?

The Daily Tech Feed reports:

Bluesky’s Active User Base Declines Amid Strategic Shift

Thus, Aaron Ross Powell responds:

We Needn't Have a One True Platform

This x 2,000.

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're painfully nurturing Manade. ;)

Blasts from the past

Working with the 4Rs of Web Development

The Programmer's Fulcrum 7 August, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:20:38 +0000

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

It's your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Open Social 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 open social 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)

We're tooting our horn this week. In our latest article, I wrote:

In this article we will cover a simple, DIY strategy. In particular, it's about what I call the 4Rs of web development. They are empowering, reduce frustration, and help you feel good about your work (and yourself).

And there's the added benefit that this work strategy thwarts democracy and planet destroying tech bros, oligarchs, and autocrats.

FYI, it also contains a spiky anti-AI rant.

On related note number 1, The Nerve reports:

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

On related note number 2, The Guardian has a book review of Gil Durán's:

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. The book’s central argument is that big tech is no longer our friend, as many of its billionaire owners have seized economic and political control and are steering the fate of the planet towards their own bizarre, apocalyptic visions.

Gil says (the question now), “is how we turn the momentum in our favour and against the billionaires. Because they have a plan to win. They think they’re going to succeed.”

This could be a radicalising moment: “In fighting against billionaire power, we find the key to all of our problems. Every moment is an important opportunity to wake people up and to start to fight back.”

If not, he says, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where “we don’t have democracy, we don’t have an economy and we don’t have a future. If that doesn’t radicalise people, then we deserve what we’re going to get.”

‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley

This is what we have been covering for years. And literally the reason for suffering through a coding bootcamp in 2018 so I could better understand the programming side of this evil.

CMSs

Telex reports:

Nearly 500-page document details manipulation of news at Hungarian state news agency during Orbán era

Protocols for Publishers interviews:

Mike Masnick on protocols for publishers

Simon Repp announces:

The fifth beta release for Faircamp 2.0 is now available

IndieWeb

Nothing to See Here explores:

Publishing websites on Freenet

I was "this week" years old when I learned about the peer to peer site builders Freenet and Delta.

So, I started The Fulcrum 3 on Delta to experiment (it just has our articles, so no posts). If you have Freenet installed and running, I think you can see it here. Or type EMWvaZfLnK in the Delta interface. Maybe. ;)

By the way, these P2P tools definitely use the 4Rs (after setup). Not that it would be simple for many people to find and read their creations. It's definitely for private sites (used by tech-savvy individuals), which is probably a good thing. ;)

Brennan Kenneth Brown examines:

Phoneblogging

Ghost

Magic Pages asks:

Staging site or a local copy?

I am sharing this as a reference for myself. ;)

BTW, I am going to go one more year with Ghost as the home for the main Fulcrum site here before deciding between it, WordPress, or something else as the permanent choice.

So Ghost, pick up your fucking ActivityPub integration game, if you want a long-term client. In particular, the reader and 3rd party Fediverse client compatibility suck. The same is not true for your competition.

Bear

Cats and Birds and Stuff explains:

Why I Left WordPress for BearBlog

Simple is better, as long as Herman never shuts down Bear.

Leaflet

Scraps shares:

On Atmospheric Stacks… Or, how we can supplant Substack and take back the stack, together as an ecosystem!

Write.as / WriteFreely

Write.as asks:

Been a while since you logged into Write.as?

If you have a website, please use it. Share your unique insights frequently no matter how small or insignificant you think they are. They are literally revolutionary at this point.

Tools

Organic Maps announces:

Bugfixes and improvements for public transport, routing, search, and bookmarks in the July 2026 update

I ran across this useful resource this week:

Chapril by April

And I added it to our tools page.

Chat / Team Chat

It’s Going Down has:

The P.E.T. Guide

P.E.T. apps are self-contained applications that permit Peer-to-peer and Encrypted messaging over Tor.

Browsers

Servo has this report:

June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more!

And 9to5Linux has a:

First Look at Firefox’s Brand-New Design in Firefox Nightly

Remember to use Firefox forks like Waterfox, Librewolf, or Zen.

Writing

LibreOffice looks at:

The characteristics of a truly open document standard format

9to5Linux reports:

Calibre 9.13 E-Book Manager Improves PDF Output, Content Server, and More

Creative

And:

Shotcut 26.7 Video Editor Adds Graphics Adapter for Linux, Shake Video Filter

Linux / Open Android

And:

NVIDIA Joins Dell and HP in Supporting the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS)

PostmarketOS announces:

Non-adaptive apps hidden in Phosh by default

Tuta shares:

DeGoogled phones, made in Europe: Fairphone, Volla, SHIFTphone, Punkt – a full review

You should own one.

Speaking of, e/OS announces:

Please welcome /e/OS 4.1.1

On the last day of July, Purism shared its:

PureOS Development Report: June 2026

Ruben de Smet explores:

My Sailfish OS Journey: I have my Jolla Phone, what now?

F-Droid has:

Three Test Jails on a 512 MB Free-Tier VPS

Larvit Blog shares:

This week's featured OMN tool

Chapril Toolbox

The site offers free and accessible online services that use alternatives to GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) products.

Chavril by April

Programming

W3C shares:

Further Aligning W3C's Program of Technical Work with Human Rights

Nice thoughts, but actions are more important.

LibreOffice reports:

CISA Publishes Open Source Security Guidance: Verifiability Is the Difference

Git

Damien Mathieu says:

Thank you, Codeberg

Moi, aussi.

Lalit Maganti opines:

GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

Since it's shit, I don't know why you would want to replace it. If you need a enterprise solution, use Gitlab. If you are ethical, use Codeberg. And it you need social dopamine hits with your git, use Tangled.

HTML

Master.dev explores:

Something Nobody Told You About The Image Element (It Can Overflow!)

Unplanned Obsolescence explains:

The Difference Between a Button and a Link

You rarely need the first, but many people misuse them. Including the template we're using on this site. :(

HTMX

Serge Zaitsev says:

Let's make the worst htmx ever! ;)

Fafael demonstrates:

Building Progressively Enhanced Forms Using htmx

CSS

Master.dev looks at:

5 CSS Properties You Should Know for Better Text Designs

Some useful CSS.

Web Components

JavaScript

Piccallili explores:

Creating Promises

This bedeviled me in full-stack bootcamp. ;(

Akido reports:

Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

JavaScript. Gotta love it. Not!

AI

The Guardian reports:

Chasing new skills, going back to basics and pushing for collective action: how software engineers are adapting to AI

If you are a wage slave (even a well paid one), this is what you have to deal with.

Pivot to AI reports:

Copilot prompt injection goes viral in your documents

Not a WebDev language, but Inside Rust Blog reports:

rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

Every opensource project should as well.

Other

Open Project releases:

OpenProject 17.7: Resource management and better team organization

This week's featured programming tool

Pears

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

Pears

ActivityPub

The Association for Progressive Communications has an interview:

DrFed on reducing complexity and enabling more people to shape the Fediverse

A fantastic interview with someone doing the best simplification work for disastrously complicated ActivityPub development.

Journey of the Wolf and Raven announces:

Activity-Relay Server v2.5.0 RC1 is now live

SocialHome announces:

Socialhome backend v0.24.0 released

ActivityPub.space shares some info:

ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce Meeting 2026-08-05

Open Risk has a great thread:

Has there been a distinct phase of the Web after the original TBL protocols and implementations (=Web 1.0)?

Related to the 4Rs (reuse).

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Hacker's Pub

East Asian-oriented Hackers' Pub is an ActivityPub-enabled social network for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other.

Hacker's Pub

Permanent aside here (unfortunately)

This is a perpetual pet peeve because many people aren't able to comprehend ⬇️:

The Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, formal, informal, or otherwise)
and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise).
and Corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

So, recognize their natures and don't ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why we have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

Here's a more in-depth explanation of the above from Federated Mind:

Account portability on the Fediverse vs. the ATmosphere

Sturmsucht's Blog & Community shares:

A new social me

I fancy myself a photographer so this tracks for me too.

Hamish Campbell says:

The Fediverse is fun and growing, but it seems to kinda be on autopilot at the moment

Bonfire

I have a sad announcement coming about our Manade project next week.

Thinking with Portals explores:

Increasing lot sizes of our digital homes

This is some good thinking. ;)

ATProto

Permadeath advocates for:

Adversarial internecting

We're in with this subversion tactic, though reading the post made my brain hurt a little. ;)

Scott's Thoughts include one:

On an Atmosphere OS

Thinking with Portals examines:

Decentralised Identity 🤝 Mesh Networking

Owais reports:

Bobbin is Tangled's read-only AppView

Debbie's Blatherings explains:

Why good non-techie user documentation is vital for a wider embrace of the ATmosphere

Yep. And on the Fediverse and everywhere else.

Atmosphere Community shares a presentation:

AtmosphereConf Interactive Transcripts using Hyperaudio by Mark Boas

Atmosphere

The Verge has a long, long interview:

Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble

BTW, they clickbait the headline and framing. And the boss man isn't a clear communicator. And he seems more naive than villainous. Which is better than I expected.

Interlinked says:

Let's Talk Money

This is a more interesting article about the future of the Atmosphere.

What's Happening on my Feed? shares:

Community (Moderation) in Practice

Ewan Croft reports:

W Social Isn't New. It Isn't Truly European. It Isn't Even Theirs.

Fuck W Social and the bamboozled fucks on it. It’s understandable for a company to be a box of cunts, and the general public to be clueless marks, but I hate tech-gullible, easily-bought politicians. They do almost as much harm as the techno fascists.

RSS

Sindre shares:

Best practices for RSS

It's FOSS reviews:

Escape the Algorithm: 10 RSS Feed Readers You Can Self Host in Your Homelab

Stefan Van Buren advises:

PSA: Include full article content in feeds

Oui.

XMPP

XMPP shares:

The XMPP Newsletter July 2026

Consider attending their online summit.

Matrix

Matrix announces:

Matrix Community Workation Krems 2026

Democracy Tech

Decidim asks:

Would you like to propose a session at the next edition of Decidim Fest 2026?

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're painfully nurturing Manade. ;)

Blasts from the past

Fed up with Big Tech, communities turn to data collectives for control

Working with the 4Rs of Web Development

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:45:21 +0000

This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

Revolutionary? and self-rewarding! K.I.S.S. and DIY WebDev strategy cripples tech bros, oligarchs, and autocrats

Here at The Fulcrum we cover items and ideas in the Techno Anarchist Manifesto relating to KISS and DIY development for the Open Media Network and Open Social. We preach, promote, and practice keeping your work simple and crafting it yourself. It might require more effort but it's more rewarding. If you follow us, you know that.

You also know I'm prone to curse. If not, you're now pre-warned. Asides over.

You probably got this, but the 4Rs are a riff on Reduce, Reuse, Recycle for the consumption of physical goods.

And the principle of the four's usage would apply to any type of programming work to a significant degree.

And there's the added benefit that this work strategy thwarts democracy and planet destroying tech bros, oligarchs, and autocrats.

Moving on, the Techno Anarchism-based 4Rs are:

Resist
Reduce
Reuse
Recirculate

If you aren’t self-employed, please try to influence your clients, coworkers, and management to follow or let you follow the 4Rs within your projects.

This is not all or nothing. Every little bit helps, even following a few of them. Win the battles you can when laboring (not working) for the necessities in life.

You’ll notice I’m using the word “work” a lot. The previous advice necessitates a quick note on the difference between "labor" and "work".

The first is what you have to do to earn money to pay for whatever housing, food, utilities, transportation, etc. you need to survive. You’re part of the labor force and to some degree do forced labor. And I would advise being in a union so you can at least get paid well for putting up with it.

The second is effort you voluntarily choose to exert and which can be a reward in and of itself. If you’re very fortunate this work could also provide income. Then you would be working for yourself whether you're self-employed or not.

So, let's get to “work” with the 4Rs.

Resist

Unsurprisingly, as a techno anarchist we recommend resisting all the techshit that is infecting every element of our lives. And it's only getting worse at an exponential rate thanks to all the clueless fucks using AI for any and everything. This is especially true for programming. And even for "real" programmers who should know better.

So, resist:

Techno Feudalism
Techno Fascism/Authoritarianism
Generative AI Tools
Non-standard Code
Proprietary Code

Yanis Varoufakis came up with the term Techno Feudalism. He writes:

'“… capitalism is dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. … that role … has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call techno feudalism.

… the thing that killed capitalism is capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial revolution, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful that its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.”

That capital is rent-seeking cloud capital.

Use the link above to learn more about techno feudalism, cloud capital, and how not to become a serf.

But for web development purposes, resisting techno feudalism involves not having anything to do with big tech's tooling and the benighted efforts of its sub-human oligarch owners and amoral/immoral executive management.

That includes not using GitHub, VS Code, CoPilot, Azure, ASP.NET, Edge, React JS, Angular JS, Chrome, Gemini, Ruby on Rails, AWS, xCode, Swift, Safari, Codex, Claude, etc, fucking etc.

Techno Fascism/Authoritarianism is what the tech oligarch owners/purveyors (of these examples and other techshit) do on a daily basis and hope to achieve. They're trying to maximize their raping and pillaging.

So we won't have to kill the evil vikings, let's resist and weaken them in order to drastically reduce their wealth and source of power over us. Without obscene wealth they can't lobby, bribe, or buy our shit politicians.

Please don't give them even one penny of your cash or monetization of your attention or time.

For "AI", just rinse and repeat as it is an artifact of fascism with very few legitimate uses. Pure and simple.

Sorry, but I'm going on a quick, spiky rant.

For general usage, unless you're disabled (and it enables you) or you're communicating in a second language, try not to be a clueless dipshit and don't use AI.

Nobody likes a slop merchant and the shit digital products they "create" suck on a practical level. So, please just don't go there.

And don't fucking whine "but it's useful." Chemical weapons are useful for killing people but that doesn't mean you should use them.

In any event, these "useful" tools only provide slight improvements, average results, and little ROI compared to their extravagant costs to your wallet and soul. And that doesn't include the more dreadful costs to the place where you live and your neighbors.

Most importantly, generative AI is stolen goods being fenced in online pawnshops in order to deskill the workforce and drive down the cost and power of labor. And it's knowingly destroying the environment and local communities every step of the way. If you don't care about that, I'm sorry but you're a cunt. Get off my website and don't come back.

So, fuck AI and 98.24% of anything to do with it.

Be an asshole luddite like me, not a techno fascist.

Sorry, but this shit boils my piss. :(

Ok, rant over.

Finally, please resist using some idiot's vibe code or any other non-standards-based garbage whether it's generated by a LLM or an incompetent human developer. There is plenty of time-tested, community-trusted, high-quality stuff to reuse (as you will see below).

There are also practical financial reasons for resisting all this tech bro nonsense. Expensive (in the first place), rent-seeking, and addictive corporate "solutions" will inevitably enshittify and fuck you and your long-term projects over.

They are many monetary rewards for avoiding the use of proprietary code, platforms, and systems tooling. Use opensource (but not necessarily free) tools for more financial recourse. I'm sure you're intelligent enough to be able to successfully manage the investment.

Reduce

The second R involves reducing (if not eliminating) the use of overly-complicated clusterfucks like frontend frameworks, most backend frameworks, and development platforms. And it avoids misapplying languages like JavaScript or Python in the first place. This applies to both proprietary and opensource tech.

So, no React, Angular, NodeJS, Tailwind, Bootstrap, Atlassian, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, corporate cloud tech, AI IDEs, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, etc., etc., etc. for us and our web development work.

Please use the simplest tool(s) for each task you have to accomplish. There is no need for 95% of this command-line, CI/CD, deployment, dependency, permissions, builds, API accessing hell.

And trying to use one size fits all, enterprise-scale solutions for the smallest tasks is about the most ineffective thing you can do. Plus, simple is more secure as well.

The best stack is no stack. Strategically stock your toolbox with long-lasting, effective, and simple tools for achieving the best results for your unique work.

You'll find it less frustrating and alienating if a little more time-consuming.

Our minds need exercising and skills need using to stay sharp. Again, this is good for our mental health as developers.

Reduce your use of over-engineered horseshit and your projects will work years from now and most importantly just work period. Today.

Reuse

Please don't reinvent the wheel. There is nothing that is new under the techno sun. Just use standards-based development's existing tools and techniques for guaranteed success. The best way to do things, is to use things, that already do things the best way. That's the third R.

So, reuse/use:

Web Standards
HTML and CSS
Vanilla JavaScript and PHP if needed
Code Snippets
Web Components if needed
Opensource Tools
Protocols

You can easily research, find, and reuse standards-based solutions to your challenges because standards are well documented by their very nature. Use what works.

Vanilla code is easier to learn or source for more complicated tasks. This is because it's also well documented and there is lots of readily available training. It's easy to upskill yourself because much of that training is time-tested, evergreen, and free. In other words it uses the fourth R. ;)

You should also save and reuse your customized code snippets or use those available via helpful code libraries. Store them wherever you want as long as it's free from being scraped. Please don't feed the slop engines and monetize the slop merchants.

If truly needed, vanilla web components are the shining example of this strategy. Plug and play saves the day for projects that legitimately need extra functionality.

But, most of the time you shouldn't even need the majority of these components. Don't use a tap screw where a thumb tack will work. In fact, you should even try to avoid vanilla JavaScript, PHP, and databases whenever you can.

There are dozens of simple, readily available, and easy to use opensource tools (see the link above) for web development that selflessly serve the community and need your support.

Please use them.

And when you do, finance them with small monetary donations or indirectly finance them with code or in-kind contributions. Please, assist them via promotion at a minimum.

They will pay you back ten fold.

Other than FTP, web protocols are something you rarely need to touch, but if you do need them, use them natively rather than via obfuscated platforms or tools. Remember, even if you're working on a sophisticated PWA, let's avoid clusterfuck tech.

Recirculate

The fourth R involves showing and sharing your work and knowledge so others can benefit from your rewarding experiences.

Share quick tips on open social and write how-to articles or produce videos for your community. That is the essence of participating in the Open Media Network. It's even a form of informal documentation.

Giving back builds karma and empowers more developers to build more websites and PWAs for everyone to use in place of techno feudalist platforms. It's a virtuous circle. And it feels good to help others.

Now, the best form of recirculating is building on/improving existing opensource tools and (of equal importance) formally documenting those efforts.

On that note, please maintain and update your documentation just as much as you do the code. Shit outdated docs defeat the purpose of DIY and recirculation.

And this could be part of the 1.76% of AI usage that might be justified. That's provided it's opensource AI, locally trained on your information, and hosted on servers or personal computers you totally control.

Alright, enough with the asides. Let's finish this exploration.

Wrapping it up

So, using the 4Rs isn't rocket science. It's just purposely following a simple and sound strategy by building simple sites and apps (yourself). And doing it with simple tools. But their use furthers an incredibly important goal - debilitating oligarchs (whether feudalists or fascist/authoritarians) and the autocrats they buy.

Please resist the tech overlords, reduce your consumption of their techshit, reuse proven tech that already exists (in your unique way), and recirculate your improvements, creations, and discoveries.

Again, this is not an all or nothing strategy. Like following techno anarchism itself, every little bit you do helps a little bit of everything.

If we follow the 4Rs within our web development and PWA work, we can go a long way in defeating techno feudalism, techno fascism/authoritarianism, and tech-bro-ism in general while keeping a smile (or smirk) on our face. We'll also create better projects.

Let's get to work with the 4Rs, be proud of what we build, improve our mental health, bring back the web we used to love, and set an example for other programmers!

CTAs

Please share this article.
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The Programmer's Fulcrum 31 July, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 05:42:02 +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 Open Social 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 open social 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)

Rest of World writes:

A growing pushback against big tech companies, and greater awareness of the value of data, is spurring interest in data collectives and cooperatives, which give communities control over the collection, management, and distribution of their data.

This alternative allows creators to benefit from data sets that may otherwise be ignored or misused.

This works well with my diminishing hopes for Manade. ;) See the Fediverse section below.

Henry Codes writes:

The widespread deployment of AI/LLMs constitutes an existential threat to labor whether or not it is an adept move by the adoptive industries. Thus it is essential for workers to stop asking whether or not AI works and start asking who ultimately benefits from its deployment.

It doesn’t matter if it works

Speaking of this horseshit, Zuzai.org writes:

I'll begin with something obvious: things made with AI tools are proliferating in lots of places where lots of people don't want them.

Not so obvious: we don't have a good, crisp word to indicate that something is NOT one of these things, in other words, that it is free of AI.

We need a new word. How about ... zuzai?

As in this website is zuzai. We're all in.

CMSs

Kyrylo Silin says:

The favicon survived the web

Germ's mama, Anna asks:

Why websites?

Typemill announces:

Typemill 2.25.0: Relaunch and Small Improvements

Pagecord announces:

Classic just got a lot better

Bear

The Hour is Blue explores:

Writing for Readers, Not Algorithms

The same goes for MCPs.

xIre reflects on:

One Year On Bear

Good advice.

Leaflet

Leaflet announces:

An option to switch navigation direction for browsing older vs. newer posts from the post footer

And Leaflet Lab announces:

Piloting paid memberships for the open social web

Going the Ghost and SuckStack route.

Write.as / WriteFreely

Write.As has:

A small but helpful fix is out for federated blogs!

Tools

404 Media reports:

Being a Luddite Is Fun Again

On a related note, Rafael says:

Let me put in a plug for our dear old sdf.org/

Tres cool.

Chat / Team Chat

AboutSignal announces:

Scheduled messages in Note to self now work as reminders in Signal for Android

Useful.

Signal is working on registration without a phone number. But what form will it take?

Germ announces:

Germ is Now Quantum Secure

Unfortunately, it's iOS only.

Browsers

Waterfox announces:

6.7.0-beta.3- Ultra Protection returns and Linux package repositories

Search

Ecosia announces:

Your Ecosia searches in Germany just became more independent

Cloud

Nextcloud asks:

Do I belong at the Nextcloud Community Conference 2026? The answer is yes.

Writing

LibreOffice has:

LibreOffice, yours for a lifetime

9to5Linux reports:

Calibre 9.12 E-Book Manager Adds Option to Convert GIF Images to JPEG/WebP

Creative

Rolle examines:

Getting my photos Google-free – how to move from Google Photos to PixelUnion and quickly host your photo albums in Europe

Linux / Open Android

PostmarketOS announces:

New dependencies, requirements, and recommended workarounds for kernels

GrapheneOS announces:

GrapheneOS protections against data extraction from locked devices

9to5Linux reports:

Ubuntu Touch OTA 2.0 Officially Released for Supported Linux Phones and Tablets

F-Droid has:

Self-Hosting S3 object-storage with Garage

Hosting / Serving

MauveRant examines:

Interesting concept and demonstration.

This week's featured OMN tool

The Techno Anarchist Manifesto

The TAM is now available as a PDF, ebook, and website.

The Techno Anarchist Manifesto

Programming

SIV shares:

Verifiable Web Code — Why It's So Exciting

The Zone explains:

What software freedom means today

Shin's Psychedelic World examines:

Cooperative Software

Dave Rupert reviews:

The new yet familiar CodePen 2.0

See the Stolon note below as well.

Git

For all the AI butthurt Codeberg whiners:

A slop peddler has started a slop-friendly Forgejo instance

On a related note, Do Flamengos know they're Pink has:

Open Source Is Indefensible

Here's a great quote:

We don't need to defend the freedom to take from everyone all the time.

Our freedom to associate, our freedom to refuse, and our freedom to decide over infrastructure we reasonably control all need defending though, and all of that is outside the jurisdiction of licences and code. Thank you Codeberg for reminding us it was there all along.

Tangled is:

Introducing Bobbin

And Ricard Torres is:

Moving away from GitHub to self hosted Gitea

HTML

That HTML Blog asks:

Are y'all ready for HTMLDay?

SelfHTML.blog has:

Spickzettel zum schnellen Nachschlagen

The Art of Not Asking Why? shares:

Style & Emacs Config: A Semantic HTML Reckoning

CSS

Master.dev advises:

When You Need To Make a Triangle, Think Conic Gradients

Botmonster Tech says:

CSS @starting-style lets you animate elements on entry without JavaScript

Web Components

Raphaël Bastide shares:

Stolon has been updated, big time!

Cool tool.

JavaScript

Evil Martians (with the best site design on earth) shows us:

The secure way to release an NPM package in 2026

Master.dev looks at:

Same Name, Different Component with Scoped Custom Element Registries

AI

Brno Hat explains:

How AI Is Changing Open Source

And it's not in a good way.

Ivan Enderlin shares:

GCC declines any legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content

Good.

Other

XWiki shares its:

Release Notes for XWiki 18.6.0

This week's featured programming tool

In honor of their telling the slopmerchants and cryptobros to fuck off, it's Codeberg

A community-led effort that provides Git hosting for free/open source projects.

Codeberg

ActivityPub

ActivityPub.Space is:

Reflecting on the existence of httpsig.org

Ethan Black notes:

Development is being done in GitLab to add ActivityPub support!

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Fedify

Fedify is a Typescript framework that lets you build for the fediverse but skip the boilerplate.

Fedify

Permanent aside here (unfortunately)

This is a perpetual pet peeve because many people aren't able to comprehend ⬇️:

The Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, formal, informal, or otherwise)
and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise).
and Corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

So, recognize their natures and don't ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why we have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

The Nexus of Privacy says:

The time is right: Organizing against the surveillance-industrial complex in the ATmosphere and the fediverses

This is literally what we're going for here at The Fulcrum.

Bonfire

Bonfire is:

Announcing Bonfire for communities: groups and tools to organise together

Sharing a case study

AmalDev answers:

Tech Explained: What Survives an Internet Shutdown?

ATProto

Paul's Blog has:

Starting from scale in the design of the AT Protocol

Nick's Blog continues a series:

Permissioned Data Shapes: Feeds

Permissioned Data Shapes: Notifications

Chris's Corner looks at:

The disconnect between web pages and the social filesystem

Atmosphere

Leaflet Labs asks and answers:

What is the Atmosphere?

For potential users.

Wreckage/Salvage is:

Launching a Cloud Atlas

Standard Reader asks:

What is Standard.Site? Next gen RSS?

Cosmik Labs explores:

Sensors, not just bookmarks (Patterns of Sensemaking #1)

Quite interesting.

Babesky says:

Reclaim Your Algorithm

And Colibri.Social says:

If NVIDIA can un-launch a GPU, we can delay an app launch

Unfortunate, though smart.

P2P

After the Distortion Field explores:

The Antithesis: Why Freenet and Serverless Networks Are Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty

RSS

Jared Lemler shares:

AT Protocol & RSS

A new way to build RSS clients?

Karthikeyen NG looks at:

RSS in 2026 — the best distribution channel nobody uses

Use it, mes amis.

Terry Godier announces:

Current Now Supports Feedly in v1.0.15

XMPP

XMPP previews:

XMPP at FOSSY 2026

Nicoco shares:

Quicksy ferme les inscriptions

Georg (not George) Lucas asks:

Are Emojis Allowed in XMPP Addresses?

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're painfully nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

The back door surveillance state

Our First Anniversary Brings a Narrowed Focus for Weekly TPFs

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:40:17 +0000

Tightening up the ship

After a year of publishing The Fulcrum, I (as publisher) now know the topics, tools, and techniques I want to focus The Programmer's Fulcrum coverage on.

And maybe it will have the side benefit of shorter TPF posts. We'll see if I can tighten up my discipline as well. ;)

That narrowed focus is on tools and techniques that best meet the requirements of the Techno Anarchist Manifesto philosophy in regards to development for web and open social.

Techno Anarchism is the philosophy, strategies, and most importantly actions needed to defeat Techno Feudalism.

The tighter focus will also include what's anti- surveillance-capitalism, big tech, AI, techno feudalism, and techno fascism. Two-sides(ism) for some things is horseshit.

And our weekly TPFs will continue to cover programming standards. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. We have the tools we need now to protect ourselves from these techbro oligarch cunts.

Here at The Fulcrum we want our readers to build their own site(s) in order to participate in the Open Media Network. We want them to share/promote their voices via Real Simple Syndication (RSS), Open Social, and even a newsletter or podcast. That's why we exist and put in hours of weekly effort and service.

The world needs your knowledge, experiences, and advice.

Readers will benefit from this focus on helping them fight the enshittification of our modern society and destruction of the the planet we share.

We seek to enable the building of new alternatives with existing tools rather than more of the same techshit that got us where we are today. It's past time to stop chasing the new and shiny and get to work with what works now.

The Programmer's Fulcrum posts will have more emphasis on DIY punkish tech and less enterprise-oriented tooling. So opensource (but not necessarily free) tech will be featured. Less is more and let's K.I.S.S.!

Also we won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We have enough foes to fight without squabbling with our allies. Let's give the benefit of the doubt to our fellow travelers who share our goals if not beliefs and tactics. We want more hunting dogs and less dogma.

Ok, let move on. So here's what we will focus on going forward. I'll go through the topics in the order they are covered in The Programmer's Fulcrum posts.

Content Management Systems / Site Builders

Our first requirement is that site tech be:

Flat file for tech savvy users or
Super simple to use

Our second requirement for coverage is that the tech is:

Able to use Markdown or plain text for content
Able to edit HTML and CSS
Preferably be Self-hostable
Ideally installable without the command line, multiple dependencies, and complex server setup

The flat file advantage

Flat file CMSs don't require databases, are faster, have few if any dependencies, and are more secure. They are the best option for small to medium scale sites.

Grav (Symfony Station), Kirby (Manade), Publii (Les Chroniques de Walker), Typemill (Publications), PureBlog, Flatpress, Yellow, Bludit, and Jeckyll are examples.

If you want to see them in action, the linked ones are those I have current or shuttered (though maintained) sites on.

Simpler is better

For personal and basic sites, KISS is paramount.

Bear, LMNO, Leaflet, pckt, WriteFreely, Silex, and Skypress are examples.

Again, the linked ones above are those we have sites on. In this case to cross-distribute The Programmer's Fulcrum posts to.

Going away

Even though we have used (and loved) them in the past, the following are "over" on The Fulcrum. Platforms that are too big, too complicated, too AI brainwashed, or too compromised by techbroist founders are being deep-sixed.

These too-muchees include WordPress, Ghost, Drupal, Build Awesome, etc. Nothing personal but there are many outlets covering these sub-optimal options.

Having open social integration is no longer a preference for our coverage either. These large platforms (other than WordPress) do a poor job of it anyway. We now recommend using separate open social tools and manually integrating/linking out to them. Although native integration is a nice to have.

Tools

Our coverage of techno-anarchist and OMN tools stays the same with the focus remaining on opensource, KISS, and DIY options.

Programming

Our focus will remain on standard-based web development. We're gonna bear down on Markdown, Git, HTML/X, CSS, and minimalist vanilla JavaScript. Some minor coverage of tools like IDEs, OpenProject, XWiki, Forgejo, and Codeberg will continue.

But the focus will now be exclusively on tech for individuals and very small teams. So, no coverage for enterprise-level nonsense, even if it's opensource. And fuck AI and any projects that use or accept contributions from it.

Open Social

This will be short.

For the Fediverse and Atmosphere spheres we're going to focus on the development efforts of the ActivityPub and ATProto communities.

Going away

We're dropping direct coverage of Fediverse and Atmosphere apps unless it's development related. This is especially true for Mastodon and Bluesky.

On a unsolicited advice note, please use options other than these flagships if you want to be able to use the Fediverse and Atmosphere ten years from now.

Other

This will be shorter.

Our coverage of tools like XMPP, P2P, RSS, Webmentions, Webrings, Democracy tech, etc. will stay the same.

That's it friends

We're going to make this effort to be more focused on actionability for democracy and environment loving developers. There are now more outlets for coverage of the topics we're dropping than there were a year ago.

This should make our efforts to enable non-developers to resist surveillance-capitalism, techno-feudalism, and techno-fascism more effective as well.

Thanks for reading and go help destroy autocracy.

CTAs

Please share this article.
Follow The Fulcrum on Surf or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse or at @thefulcrum.eurosky.social on the Atmosphere for daily coverage.
Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

The Programmer's Fulcrum 24 July, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:37:35 +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 Open Social 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 open social 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)

Patrick Leavy writes:

Both Big Tech and government security services operate large scale surveillance. How do they relate to one another? In the West we say "Aren't we lucky we don't live in a surveillance state like China!" but haven't we just privatised the surveillance?

Ludic Mataroa writes:

I've had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis.

This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.

The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions.

The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

What's Happening on my Feed? writes:

Social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news, and political campaigns.

As app owners have enmeshed themselves more with the state, the carceral logics that haunt marginalized communities offline, became a part of their digital realities online.

Traditional Social Media as a Prison

CMSs

TechPolicy Press shares:

The Web Needs a Context Layer Built on a Shared Protocol

This is all well and good but we need less talk and more walk from NGO fucks.

Adam Newbold explores:

Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

Great stuff.

I also ran across the options OnionPress, Skypress, and Pagecord this week.

WP Mayor compares:

WP-CLI vs REST API vs Abilities API: Choosing the Right WordPress Interface for the Job

pckt opines:

Blogging: It's more social than ever !

So, similar to Ghost's capabilities but in the Atmosphere.

Write.as / WriteFreely

Write Freely announces:

WriteFreely v0.17 is out now

Tools

TechCrunch reports:

Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all

Wallabag has:

Et si l'été servait à lire enfin les articles mis de côté ?

Le CAPTCHA optionnel arrive dans wallabag grâce au financement de wallabag.it

How-to Geek shares:

I turned my old Kindle into a self-hosted Pocket replacement

Chat / Team Chat

Signal announces:

Signal allows iPhones to be linked as secondary devices (beta)

Browsers

9to5Linux reports:

Mozilla Firefox 153 ESR Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

Firefox also announced they are back on Shitter.

Remember to use non-AI Firefox forks like Zen, Waterfox, or LibreWolf. Fuck Firefox and Mozilla's Vichy asses.

Waterfox announces:

6.6.17- Security and regional search follow-up

Cloud

Nextcloud compares:

Freedom of choice in Nextcloud Office: powered by Euro-Office, Collabora, and Thinkfree Office

I would avoid any MicroSlop taint, so don't use Euro-Office.

Writing

LibreOffice explains:

How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

And announces:

LibreOffice 26.2.5 is available for download

Explorers show us:

How to Design with Hyperlinks

A look at how to lay out eBooks. Useful and I think my 2027 project will be to write a book.

Creative

GIMP has its:

Google Summer of Code Midpoint Progress

Linux / Open Android

F-Droid has:

Self hosting a PDS isn't hard (so far)

Hosting / Serving

Coryd says:

This week's featured OMN tool

Skypress

A calm place to write long-form, and publish it to the open social web.

Skypress

Just click and write.

Programming

Random Thoughts on Leadership and Technology shares:

The Open-Soruce Big Bang

Very interesting. Can AI coded opensource products kill off corporate tech horseshit before corporate tech kills the planet?

A related question, will open, Chinese communist AI kill off fascist Silicon Valley AI?

Git

Forgejo announces:

Forgejo 16.0.1 was just released!

BleepingComputer reports:

FakeGit campaign uses 7,600 GitHub repos to push SmartLoader malware

If you use ShitHub or AI you deserve what you fucking git. ;)

Markdown

Newsonaut opines:

Markdown makes learning HTML less scary

HTML

Geoff Graham

Handling Alt Text in a Linked Image

CSS

Masters.dev has:

Masonry (with Animation) in CSS

Slick but rarely needed effect.

Using animation-composition in CSS to Avoid Redeclaring Other Values

Ditto.

JavaScript

Infrequently Noted laments:

The Absolute State of Management

Reason 1,212,368 that React sucks. Fuck MicroSlop.

AI

Codeberg is:

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

Dusty Cloud

Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled

Are humans actually the dumbest monkeys?

TechCrunch reports:

Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them

Proycon has:

Formulating an AI policy for my free software projects

Erlend Sogge Heggen notes:

Open models are decelerationist

Other

XWiki announces:

XWiki SAS Q2 2026 updates: new features, improvements, and what’s next

OpenProject has:

Planning work is only half the job: Resource management comes to OpenProject 17.7

OpenProject Roadmap 2026: The strategic topics shaping our development

This week's featured programming tool

Forgejo

Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just Using animation-composition in CSS to Avoid Redeclaring Other Valuesdoes the job.

Forgejo

ActivityPub

Ata Kuyumcu acknowledges:

The Fediverse was right

Fantastic article.

Waffle's yttrx blog shows us how to:

Run your own welcome-bot: a step-by-step guide for other instances

Tom79 announces:

The Holos relay hits 1.0.0

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

DrFed

DrFed is a web-based platform for developing and debugging ActivityPub implementations.

DrFed

Permanent aside here (unfortunately)

This is a perpetual pet peeve because many people aren't able to comprehend ⬇️:

The Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, formal, informal, or otherwise)
and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise).
And Corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

Also, you can avoid surveillance on the Fediverse with some effort (and choosing the correct tools) but not on the Atmosphere (permissioned spaces not withstanding).

So, recognize their natures and don't ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why we have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

André Menrath reports:

There now is a poll plugin for WordPress that has full Fediverse support

Mastodon has its:

Trunk & Tidbits, June 2026

Which is cool but remember, friends don't let friends join Mastodon.Social.

Elena Rossini starts a new series:

A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up)

FediLap notes:

HolosSocial is different from any other software

The iOS app is now fairly usable though it won't generate Identity Recovery. The Linux app won't import backups. The same goes for F-Droid plus it has a weak UI. So, not ready for primetime yet regarding cross-platform syncing.

But, I still like and use it. It has potential.

FediTips has:

PeerTube enthusiast polykit has built a new independent search engine for PeerTube videos called PeerSeek

Mastodon updates built-in system to prevent you seeing the same post boosted again and again

Artist Alley has:

Artist-Alley implements ArchivePub, an open federation protocol built on the ActivityPub data model

Zsolt opines:

The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled "Gardens", and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web

Roomy papa, Erlend Sogge Heggen says:

I wanna make $1million for a thousand indies

Now that's an admirable business plan.

Other Federated Social Media

Daniel's Leaflets continues a series:

Permissioned Data Diary 7: Off the Record

Nick's Blog also continues a series:

Permissioned Data Shapes: Private Events

Permissioned Data Shapes: Community-Moderated Content

Permissioned Data Shapes: Forums

Permissioned Data Shapes: Polls

On a related note, Luke Kanies shares some doubts:

Building on ATProto

Boltless reports:

Tangled is considering changing the data host of some records from PDS to Knot

Aral Balkin asks:

Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are…

And Hamish Campbell chimes in with:

Europe’s digital sovereignty needs challenges

Meanwhile, Mu.Social is:

Introducing Newsrooms v1 in
mu.social

The Walrus has:

A Canadian Social Network? Don’t Roll Your Eyes Yet

eMail / Newsletters

Magic Pages compares:

Substack vs. Ghost for a paid newsletter

Plus as I'm sure you know, Suckstack is a Nazi bar. So, don't publish on it, read anything from it, or sharing any of its Vichy content.

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're painfully nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

The Internet Doesn't Want Readers. It Wants Livestock.

The Programmer's Fulcrum 17 July, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:43:42 +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 Open Social 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)

The Grumpy Welshman writes:

Gareth's been in a mood all week.

Turns out it started with a hosting bill. Not his own, mind. He doesn't have a website. Gareth thinks websites are for people who've run out of pub to shout in. But he heard about someone switching platforms, and it set him off on one of his tangents, the kind that starts with "you know what really gets me" and ends forty minutes later with him accusing a cookie banner of moral cowardice.

Apparently someone had moved from a platform that wanted to squeeze money out of their audience to one that just let them publish words on a page, and Gareth treated this as evidence that civilisation might not be completely dead after all.

So here's Gareth, unedited, more or less.

My name is not Gareth, BTW. ;)

The 19th reports:

After losing their jobs at NOAA, Rebecca Lindsey, her sister and another colleague teamed up to rebuild a pivotal resource the Trump administration took offline.

Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it.

Now this is building something for a community.

Here's another one:

GainForest App

CMSs

Faircamp announces:

Faircamp 2.0 is now feature complete

Ver Vert demonstrates:

Publishing a Zola Blog to AT Protocol with Sequoia and wisp.place

Opus explores:

Blogging with ~~Bluesky~~ The Atmosphere and ATProtocol

I fixed their headline.

Leaflet

Leaflet Lab Notes announces:

Publication pages and nav, for Leaflet as…website builder?

Ghost

Ghost says:

Optimize your site for AI search

Um. Fuck no.

Subaud shows us what's involved with:

Making a Ghost Blog a Valid standard.site Publication

So, definitelty not KISS. You could more easily re-post to a ATProto blog and list the Ghost URL as canonical. That's what we do.

Magic Pages announces:

Staging Sites: Test Big Changes Before They Go Live

Its owner, Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki shares:

The Cost of Copying Things That Haven't Changed

Spectral Web Services announces:

Institutional access to Ghost now included with SWS Tools!

Build Awesome

Build Awesome announces:

A new Build Awesome (Eleventy) alpha is available for testing

Tools

Tuta shares the:

Best Amazon alternatives in 2026

Lauti shows us:

How to Community Calendar!?!

BTW, Lauti is built into Bonfire.

Speaking of community tech, I found out about Karrot this week:

Karrot

OMN says:

Online Chat is a social problem, not just a technical one

Signal announces:

Signal is now available on Android tablets

Signal allows Android phones to be linked as secondary devices (beta)

Browsers

Betweeen Two Firewalls explores:

Manifest v3: Why It Is Time To Leave Chromium/Chrome/Edge

The time was years ago. But better late than never.

Creative

Simple Tech Guides shows us how to:

Self-host Immich for photo backup: migrating off Google Photos

Linux / Open Android

Linux Magazine starts a series:

Changing the Chip Industry: How Public Investment Has Grown Open Silicon

This week's featured OMN tool

GIMP

Say bye to Photoshop with GIMP, an open source image editor.

GIMP

Programming

Evangelos Paterakis shares:

Democratizing Abandonware; I'm not digging through this cemetery

Git

Forgejo announces:

Forgejo 15.0.5 was just released!

How to Geek explores:

Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives

CSS

Master.dev examines:

In-N-Out Animation using sibling-index()

W3C announces:

CSS Linked Parameters Module Level 1

Carmen Ansio demonstrates:

Setting type like a printed page

AI

Samir Talwar has:

LLMs can't program

No shit, but this is a great article.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation reports:

The ‘s’ in LLM stands for ‘security’

Smashing Frames says:

“Useful” is not sufficient

Unfortunately, most programmers are amoral shits.

Other

OpenProject explores:

From Jira to OpenProject: choosing the right migration strategy for your organization

This week's featured programming tool

HTMX

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

HTMX

ActivityPub

Robin Berjon ponders running:

ActivityPub Over ATProto

This may be somewhat similar to what holos.social is attempting.

Fabio Manganiello announces a:

New Akkoma feature

Dhole Moments explains:

The Long Tail of Work Left Until ActivityPub Has E2EE

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Holos Discover

HolosDiscover is a search engine dedicated to the Fediverse.

Holos Discover

Permanent aside here (unfortunately)

This is a perpetual pet peeve because many people aren't able to comprehend ⬇️:

The Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, formal, informal, or otherwise)
and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise).
And Corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

Also, you can avoid surveillance on the Fediverse with some effort (and choosing the correct tools) but not on the Atmosphere (permissioned spaces not withstanding).

So, recognize their natures and don't ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why we have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

Arxiv looks at:

The Politics Attention Makes: Platform Media Logic and the Mediatization of Politics

Per Axom notes:

It’s hard to search and find messages across the Fediverse. This is a good thing.

It is. See the second point directly above.

Tuiter Rocks explains:

Cómo funciona la moderación en Mastodon: qué ve un admin y qué herramientas tiene

Federated Minds concludes a series:

Forums, Reading, and Music on the Fediverse

Eilertsens Kodenknekkeri announces a:

Superblock v3.1 addon for Hubzilla

Framasoft announces:

We just released version 2.2.0 of the PeerTube app!

FitPub announces:

FitPub 1.2.0 is here!

Bonfire

The Phoenix Framework shares:

A deep dive into HEEx compilation from LiveView 1.2

Protocols for Publishers says:

"Build protocols, not platforms"

SneakerWeb explains:

The sneakerweb is a peer-to-peer protocol for web publishing without permission

Quite interesting, but probably not easy.

Hamish Campbell has:

A hybrid p2p look at the OMN

Matrix

Matrix shares:

This Week in Matrix 2026-07-10

Continuwuity announces:

Continuwuity 26.6.0, the lightweight Matrix chat server, is finally out!

RSS

Coywolf reports:

You can now chat using RSS

XMPP

Movim announces:

The next Movim release comes with a special surprise: a fully integrated SFU service, powered by Galene

Other Federated Social Media

ATProto shares:

AT Protocol Trademark

Hmmm.

The Tropopause pontificates:

On Atproto and Atmospheric Groups

Steve Klabnik has:

Too many words about DIDs

Bluesky announces:

Creating an Independent Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) Directory Organization

This is a rare non-techbro-ish move by Bluesky.

The Digital Renaissance opines:

Bluesky Is Not The Center of The Atmosphere

Actually, it's not the center of ATProto tools, but still 80+% of the Atmosphere.

Tech Policy Press reports:

Europe's W Social Bet Tests its Vision of Digital Sovereignty

Looks like Dubya was not only birthed by clueless shits but for them as well. Fuck politicians.

Here's example number 416 of why:

Hi Eugen

IYKYK.

Meanwhile, Eurosky announces:

Eurosky is collaborating with SPRIND to test a non-toxic algorithm for the first time

Next shares:

Un réseau social européen ? On est passé de Bluesky à Mu.social, et on vous explique

Augment explores:

Moats & Drawbridges

Jeremy Herve asks:

Is my ATProto app actually decentralized?

Inputs and Outputs has a journalists on the Atmosphere list for you:

You are what you read, watch, and listen to ..

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

Techno feudalism what changes

The Programmer's Fulcrum 10 July, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:40:00 +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)

Hamish Campbell writes:

The “cloud lords” (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple etc.) operate their own digital fiefdoms. We are the new “cloud serfs” producing data and metadata for free, generating value through participation while feeding systems that learn from us and reshape our behaviour.

Even businesses and workers are pulled in. Sellers depend on Amazon marketplaces while workers are managed through platform systems and as the EU is finding, entire infrastructures depend on AWS-style cloud provision.

From this narrowing view, capitalism starts to look secondary to rent extraction from controlled digital spaces. But is this actually a new economic system?

Firesphere writes:

Do the test, The AI Compass. It's a simple series of questions and answers, to define where you sit on the AI opinion scale. And, of course, every outcome has their patron saint.

The AI compass

I took it and here's the screenshot of the result. On the scale, I'm the union organizer. My patron saint is Cory Doctorow (although he's a little libertarian for me). So, it mostly tracks.

CMSs

Silex announces:

Silex was just added to European Alternatives, an open source catalog of alternatives to US software

This would be a good 11ty builder to experiment with. Especially the self-hosting route.

Martin Paul Eve explores:

FAIR and Square: making a static site support FAIR signposting

Interesting.

Omicron introduces:

Omicron: A Home for Free Expression on the Fediverse

This looks great.

Build Awesome

Adam DJ Brett has:

Easier Font Awesome SVGs in 11ty

11tyx5, Reprise: Build Awesome Alpha, a Whitestone Metasearch, and the Quest for Four 100s

Tools

Waag Futurelab opines:

European digital ID wallets are a gift to Google and Apple

Of course.

The Free Software Foundation Europe reports:

Apple held accountable under the DMA - A victory for developers and computer users!

Fuck Apple.

Organic Maps announces:

Satellite imagery, public transport routes, alternate routes, new Android search & route planning interface, accessibility fonts support for iOS, and more

Rolle Design demonstrates:

Getting my photos Google-free – how to move from Google Photos to PixelUnion and quickly host your photo albums in Europe

Chat / Team Chat

Signal has:

Signal lets admins end groups for everyone

Signal is working on support for linking multiple phones to a single account

Writing

LibreOffice continues a series:

The non technical dependency layers: the Calendar and the Invoice

And has:

Policy and Digital Sovereignty – TDF Annual Report 2025

LibreOffice 26.8 Beta1 is available for testing

Marijn Haverbeke announces:

Wordgard Release 0.1

Creative

404 Media reports:

Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators' Work for AI Training

Kdenlive announces:

The last maintenance release of the 26.04 series is out

GIMP shares:

What's up lately in ZeMarmot and GIMP?!

Subvert announces:

Subvert's First Annual General Meeting: September 19

Linux / Open Android

Phosh announces:

Phosh 0.56.0

Librist has:

Linux for Mobile Devices: Introducing postmarketOS

9to5Linux reports:

BleachBit 6.0.2 Adds Support for Cleaning AI Models from Google Chrome

I had not heard of BleachBit but it's a great idea and should be very useful. Especially for shoveling out AI horseshit.

TUXEDO Computers Plans to Rebase TUXEDO OS on Debian Testing

It's FOSS says:

Packet is the Linux App You Didn’t Know You Needed for Fast Android File Transfers

This could be useful.

Modal examines:

Image-Based for Developers

openSUSE announces:

Uyuni Joins openSUSE Project Ahead of Annual Conference

F-Droid shares:

Reclaiming Our Digital Selves: HCCF’s Vision for a Human-Centered Top-Level Domain

Hosting / Serving

HCCF shares:

This week's featured OMN tool

Hyper8

Hyper8 is a static site generator for video publishing.

Hyper8

Cool.

Programming

Git

The Software Freedom Conservancy reports:

GitHub & other LLM-gen-AI Companies Urge You to Misdirect California Legislature on FOSS Licensing!

Fuck ShitHub and Microslop.

Mihaela Mihaljević Jakić reveals:

Humans Don't Work at GitHub

For sure not ones who aren't cunts.

Noma announces:

GitLost: How We Tricked GitHub’s AI Agent into Leaking Private Repos

Rafael Martins shows us the way around this garbage:

Leaving GitHub

Dead Simple Tech asks:

Why don't people use git properly?

Maybe because like most things in programming these days, it's an overly complicated clusterfuck.

Tangled announces:

GM Tanglers! Its release time

HTML

Krijn Hoetmer looks at:

Code snippets and live previews

Master.dev shows us:

How to Make an Interactive Element Invisible but Accessible

CSS

Master.dev has:

Thinking Horizontally in CSS @layer

Boundary-Aware Styling in CSS

CSS god, Josh Comeau explores:

Getting Started with Anchor Positioning

David Bushell examines:

Fixing full-bleed CSS

Pawel Grzybek looks at:

Masonry aka waterfall aka collapse aka pack aka Pinterest-style layout — display grid-lanes cheatsheet for my future self

JavaScript

Code Utopia says:

Svelte feels like the "Native Language" of the Web

Svelte is definitely one of the least shitty JavaScript frameworks.

AI

David Bushell provides:

Select your starter class

Very witty. And true.

Tech Policy Press opines:

The World Doesn't Need Another UN AI Declaration. It Needs Architecture.

Ben Werdmuller says:

Governance can prevent AI from being used to undermine democracy. But only if it has teeth.

SysDig reports:

JADEPUFFER: Agentic ransomware for automated database extortion

Live by the sword, die by the sword. And the sooner the better.

Other

XWiki shares:

Change management and best practices to navigate your migration from Confluence

OpenProject announces:

OpenProject 17.6 is here

This week's featured programming tool

Pears

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

Pears

ActivityPub

Fedify has:

Why implementing ActivityPub is hard, and why it doesn't have to be

Great stuff. It needs to be as easy to build things with ActivityPub as it is with ATProto.

BotKit 0.5.0: A new design language, multi-bot instances, and consent-respecting quotes

Hrefna says:

Let's talk about hashtags in ActivityPub

Let's talk for a moment about what an actual actor model could look like in a protocol like ActivityPub

ActivityPub for WordPress announces:

ActivityPub for WordPress 9.0.0 is here

BTW and for better or worse, WordPress is handing Ghost its ass when it comes to ActivityPub integration. And even ATProto.

Tod Sundsted announces:

There are two significant new additions in release v3.8.0 of ktistec

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Kazarma

Kazarma is a bridge between two decentralized protocols: Matrix and ActivityPub.

Kazarma

Permanent aside here (unfortunately)

This is necessary because many people aren't able to comprehend this -> the Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, formal, informal, or otherwise) and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise). Corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

Also, you can avoid surveillance on the Fediverse if you want to (and choose the correct tools) but not on the Atmosphere.

So, recognize their natures and don't ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why we have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

Connected Places explores:

The Algorithm, Singular

Casually says:

The Fediverse Grew Up. Its Sign-Up Page Didn't.

See my permanent aside above.

Federated Mind continues a series:

The Written Fediverse: Where the Words Live

PieFed announces:

PieFed v1.7 is released: Following People, Faster Browsing & Smarter Moderation

Tod's Homelab shares:

The Mastodon Migration

Tim Bray opines on:

Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

I would say the Fediverse in general. And don't use mastodon.social.

Kuketz IT Security shares:

UnplugBigTech: Das Fediverse als Alternative zu X, Instagram und Facebook – Teil 7

The Democratic Tech Fund has:

Our socials, not our trap

LoRes Mesh looks at:

Binding apps to Regions in a LoRes Mesh

Matrix

Matrix announces:

Matrix 1.19 is officially here

Element says:

We’re interoperable, so you can be sovereign

Webmentions

Alex Hyett has:

Setting up Webmentions on my Static Site

Opting for privacy in webmentions

RSS

The Electronic Frontier Foundation opines:

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For

XMPP

XMPP publishes:

The XMPP Newsletter June 2026

Ignite Realtime announces its:

Openfire 5.1.1 Release

Other Federated Social Media

Jon is not impressed with Gander:

Social networks and ID verification is here

It's throwing off strong W Social vibes.

Erlend's Notes reviews:

Mu for democracy

Bits of Entropy says:

All data should be permissioned data

What’s Happening on My Feed? is:

Putting the Trust back in Trust and Safety

Blacksky announces:

The launch of Blacksky-Only Posts

Community Trash explains:

Why I'm excited about Roomy

Jon Worth shares:

Bluesky, we don’t get fooled again, the sequel

Democracy Tech

Decdim announces:

New release 0.32

Decidim and the New York City Civic Engagement Commission formalise Partnership with a Memorandum of Understanding

eMail / Newsletters

Andrew Marder notes:

Ghost Spam Signups Suck

I have also decided to go the invite only route for subscribing to our newsletter. So hit me up on open social if subscribing via a newsletter is your thing.

Ghost announces:

Publisher gift links

Magic Pages has:

A Simpler, More Secure Newsletter Sending Setup

Why a Subdomain, Not Your Main Domain, for Newsletter Sending

Tuta announces:

Tuta One-Click Migration is now in closed beta!

Cool. I think I will move my ancient personal gmail account to this when it's ready.

Tara Tarakiyee says:

I Cannot Be Trusted to Send Email

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're nuturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

Journalism’s Logical Fallacy

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 3 July, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:53:03 +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 open social 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)

Shurish Kalkarni writes:

... the path forward for journalism isn’t a technology problem or a business model problem – at least not primarily. It’s a relationship problem. And relationship problems require a fundamentally different set of tools, skills and values than the ones the industry has traditionally invested in.

The disconnect between what the industry is doing and what it really needs is jarring. Ask yourself how many so-called “audience-centric” strategies, frameworks and consultants you’ve heard about. Hundreds right? Now ask yourself how much of that work is built out of actually speaking to citizens and listening to them. Not so many.

That gap – between claiming to center audiences and actually speaking to them – is exactly where the logical fallacy lives.

Christine Lemmer-Webber writes:

it feels like there's a massive coordinated attack on internet freedoms. But it also feels like the wind is out of the sails of these fights, which is alarming, because the stakes have never been higher.

Who's coordinating all these? What money is pushing it? Palantir? Heritage Foundation types? Large, centralization-enthused orgs like Meta? All of the above? It's hard to tell. But there's certainly a lot of money flowing underfoot.

But it's not just the coordinated attack. The fight itself feels deflated, in ways the fight for the internet hasn't been before. Sure, we have orgs like the ACLU, the Open Rights Group, the EFF, Fight for the Future, the usual suspects all fighting for the rights of the internet. And that's great.

But there's something else.

It feels like people are tired.

What happened to the fight for the Internet?

Let's stay on our feet and keep swinging. Take breaks when you need to. Your second, third, fourth, and fifth winds will come back. It's a permanent battle.

CMSs

Peter Gambos says:

People still want small, personal corners of the web

Ah, oui. Et damn straight.

And Jack Yan says:

Sixteen years on, farewell to WordPress’s Akismet plug-in

Paweł Grzybek isn't buying the hype:

My blog is not on the AT Protocol, standard.site is not for me

Leaflet

Leaflet Lab introduces:

Atmosphere Field Reporter Corps

Ghost

Magic Pages shows us:

How to stop spam signups on your Ghost membership site

The real cost of self-hosting Ghost in 2026

Build Awesome

Adam DJ Brett has:

Publishing Your Eleventy Blog on the AT Protocol with Standard.site and Sequoia

Enabling Webmentions in Eleventy (11ty)

11tyx5: Five Whitestone Foundation Sites, Eleventy, and the Long Open Web

Tools

Caisse des Depots announces:

EuroCommons

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

The Free Software Foundation Europe reports:

DMA: The FSFE intervenes against Apple before European Court of Justice for the second time

The Guardian reports:

UK watchdog plans to break Apple and Google’s ‘effective duopoly’ on mobile app stores

The UK now has a chance to turn away from fascism and start walking their talk with things like this.

DB reports:

The scientists behind the new independent organization Climate.us are the same experts Trump fired because they were researching climate change

Newsletters

The University of Groningen Library says:

We are exploring whether we can use an open source platform for our newsletters

Thanks to this post, I discovered Keila and
Listmonk. If you're in Europe, Keila is the choice.

Small Web

scientiac::syntropy shares:

A too Brief Intro to Smolweb

Chat / Team Chat

Signal announces:

Signal is working on sticker replies, linked Android tablets are getting closer, and more

Browsers

Servo shares:

May in Servo: user scripts, mp4 compat, blackboxing in DevTools, and more!

Writing

LibreOffice explores:

The invisible architecture of lock-in: the layering of dependencies

In other words, fuck anything that is even 1% connected to MicroSlop. And that includes EuroOffice. I can't abide sovereignty washing.

It's FOSS reports:

Collabora Office 26.04 Keeps AI Optional and Refines Writer and Calc

Unfortunately, this is about as good as we will get for a while on the "AI" front.

9to5Linux reports:

Calibre 9.11 E-Book Manager Adds Support for Exporting Annotations as HTML Pages

Creative

David Benqué is starting:

Luddite Academy; Towards a politicised digital creative practice

9to5Linux reports:

Shotcut 26.6 Open-Source Video Editor Released with Vulkan on Linux Support

Linux / Open Android

GrapheneOS announces:

Compose TextField has bugs which cause compatibility issues with AOSP keyboard

FuriLabs announces:

FuriOS 14.0.3 is now released!

9to5 Linux reports:

Purism Announces Librem 16 as World’s Most Private and Secure Linux Laptop

MNT provides its:

MNT June 2026 Update

Larvitz Blog examines:

Upgrading FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE to 15.1-RELEASE: The Official Paths

F-Droid looks at:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Malware

Has it been a while since we said fuck Google?

This week's featured OMN tool

Harper Spell Check

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

Harper

Programming

BeOrg App looks at:

Using WebDAV to connect beorg to cloud storage providers

Murat Çorlu has:

Using inline partials in Ghost Themes

Using contentFor helper in Ghost Themes

Markdown

Dan shares:

CSS tricks for markdown blogs

CSS

Lee Cattarin recommends:

core CSS

Dripyard explains:

Why CSS Style Queries Are a Bigger Deal Than You Think

Frontend Masters explores:

Fluid Typography with progress()

JavaScript

Kami’s Corner shares:

I made an HTML quiz maker!

AI

Platformer reports:

Why the tech industry can't keep up with the AI backlash

Mindful Design promotes:

By Humans, For Humans

Other

XWiki shares:

Take back control from Atlassian: The open-source alternative stack built by XWiki and OpenProject

This week's featured programming tool

OpenProject

Open source project management software for open source developers.

OpenProject

ActivityPub

The Social Web Foundation explains:

Unsubscribing tags.pub from Open Registration Relays

Annette Schwindt shows us how to:

Make a Mastodon Follow-Up Link from WordPress Blogs available externally

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

ActivityPub Book

This is the ActivityPub handbook that every social software hacker needs.

The ActivityPub Book

Permanent aside here

Necessary because many people aren't able to comprehend this -> the Fediverse is for communities (private, semi-private, or otherwise) and the Atmosphere is for the masses (unwashed, washed, or otherwise). Corporate social media is for naive fools and intentional cunts.

Also, you can avoid surveillance on the Fediverse if you want to (and choose the correct tools) but not on the Atmosphere.

So, recognize their natures and don't fucking ask the two protocols to go against them. This is also why I have accounts on both platforms and use them differently.

Fediverse

The European Commission issues a:

New call for proposals to shape safer and more inclusive social media platforms

IFTAS announces:

The annual Social Web Operations Survey from @iftas is open!

If applicable to you, please complete the survey. It's truly important. And donate if you can.

Checkfirst Network has:

Roska Bridge: How a pro-Russian IMS exploits vulnerabilities of decentralised platforms to spread propaganda

Wallabag IT explains:

Pourquoi wallabag.it fait le choix des services européens

wallabag.it va financer des développements reversés à wallabag

Mobilizon announces:

The alternative to Facebook groups and events, as well as Meetup releases version, 5.2.4

PeerTube announces:

We've released #PeerTube 8.2.2!

The GFSC Community explains:

Why we discontinued our Mastodon server

If you're a larger community than GFSC, Bonfire would be the better fit (though hosting may not be any more inexpensive). Plus, you can lock it down and avoid the outside abuse and inept regulation issues.

But, the main point is this: if you're small (and income challenged) you need to join the instance that fits you best and not self-host one on your own. It’s easier to donate to your instance admin than manage and pay for infrastructure. And just in case, educate yourself on how to migrate away from it.

Bonfire

Bonfire announces:

Bonfire Social 1.0.5: Archipelago!

Archipelago lets you federate only with a hand-picked allow-list of trusted people, groups and servers, and keep everything else out by default. So, for example two Manade instances could federate with each other but nothing else.

RSS

FreshRSS announces a:

Breaking Change

XMPP

Movim announces:

Movim 0.31.4 is out, and it's a security-focused release!

Goffi says:

XEP-0516 "XMPP Decentralized ID (XID)" has been published

Other Federated Social Media

B. Prendergast creates an archive of:

Unique Mu.social features

Thank you Eurosky for creating Mu.

Elena Rossini asks:

W Social: a Broken Ghost Town?

Open Future asks:

W-Social: What does sovereignty mean for social media?

Grifting isn't sovereignty BTW.

Politically Inclined reports:

W Social? More Of An L, Actually

If L stands for loser, it's actually more of a C. And we all know what that stands for. It's certainly run by them.

Pizza Thoughts explores:

The AT-URI Syntax Mess

Holobrine examines:

PDS Address Books

Happy View announces:

HappyView v2.10

rpg.actor has:

Vibe Check: Effort, Risk, and Games in The Atmosphere

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're building Manade.

Blasts from the past

The Fediverse’s growing signal-to-noise problem – and who’s causing it

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 12 June, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:46:22 +0000

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.

There won't be TPFs the next two weeks as we're (mostly) done with the breakneck pace of settling into retirement in France. To celebrate we're taking a beach vacation. Although we will work on Manade's default implementation / configuration and probably an unrelated documentary script.

But, you can keep up to date by following our Fediverse account.

Featured Item(s)

Hamish Campbell writes:

The problem is not that institutions are involved (in the Fediverse), the problem is when institutional logic starts drowning out community logic to create a growing signal-to-noise problem.

The signal is people building infrastructure, running servers, writing code, creating culture, organising communities, and solving problems together.

The noise is the endless churn of reports, branding exercises, stakeholder management, conference panels, and “engagement” processes that consume energy without producing any substance.

The useful framing here might be:

Fluffy: welcoming people in, building bridges, creating shared spaces, encouraging participation.
Spiky: defending native values, challenging bad practice, calling out capture, and maintaining boundaries.

The Fediverse needs both, too much fluffy and everything gets absorbed into mainstreaming culture until the original values disappear. Too much spiky and you end up isolated, talking only to people who already agree with you. The challenge is maintaining a productive tension between the two.

The real debate isn’t institutions versus communities. It’s whether institutions can learn to work within open web culture rather than replacing it with the same management culture that has already failed across much of the closed web.

The signal is still there, the question is whether we can keep hearing it through the noise.

So, maximum building and minimum talking.

He follows up on a related note:

Nicenasty, the hidden power of soft obstruction

And how to combat the obstruction:

Working Groups, Horizontal Organising, and Getting Things Done

CMSs

Buttondown has some great advice:

Being weirder than AI is practicable and valuable

Mark Pitblado looks at:

Renting vs Owning in the digital era

Sander van Dragt announces:

Lamb 0.9.0

Nice.

Skypress has:

Say hello to SkyPress (it's an alpha, and it's a playground)

Interesting with lots of potential.

Ghost

Ghost introduces:

Dynamic filters for members

This may be a useful tool for larger Ghost publishers:

Vellumine

Tools

Open Source Initiative says:

OSI welcomes the European Union’s “Tech Sovereignty” package

The Linux Foundation Europe shares:

Linux Foundation Europe’s response to the European Commission’s public consultation: European Open Digital Ecosystems Strategy

FediVariety reviews the:

Status of the current Digital Sphere?

Internet Archive Europe says:

Maps Are Infrastructure Too

Signal has:

Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the
UK's latest threat to privacy

Why is every large party in England working to turn the country fascist before the fascists even seize power?

Heather Burns offers the term:

Grassware

Or as some have suggested SnitchTech and StasAI.

Chat / Team Chat

Delta Chat announces:

2.51+ releases are rolling into app stores

Wired reports:

Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps

Signal shares a:

Signal Security & Privacy Guide

Browsers

Christian Visintin says / asks:

Ladybird won't accept public PRs anymore - what does it mean?

Tuan-Anh Tran has:

Some concerns about Ladybird's bylaws

I had forgot about Ladybird but still hope it succeeds.

Search

Later On explores:

Google’s AI and its effects

Cloud

NextCloud has:

Nextcloud Summit 2026: Digital sovereignty comes of age

Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future

As a NextCloud customer I am not sure why you would use Euro-Office (as it's still tied to Microsofts' formatting) over fellow offering Collabora (unless you're boycotting England too). Collabra is based on LibreOffice BTW.

IMHO, if you are a small org or solo user, using LibreOffice independent of NextCloud would be the best option. And all of them beat the shit out of Office 360.

It's FOSS reports:

Collabora's CODE 26.04 Release Might Be Its Biggest One Yet

Writing

LibreOffice has:

An open letter to office suite users, just before the Euro-Office announcement

Euro-Office, open standards, and native ODF

LibreOffice project and community recap: May 2026

Creative

Kdenlive announces:

The second maintenance release of the 26.04 series is out

9to5Linux reports:

HandBrake 1.11.2 Video Transcoder Adds WebM MIME Type Support on Linux

Linux / Open Android

F-Droid shares:

Juno Tab 4 is a Linux tablet with Intel Core i3-N300 and Core Ultra 5 115U options

Liliputing reports:

As a tablet fan, this is encouraging to see.

Hosting / Serving

Nycki announces:

Docket

This week's featured OMN tool

Drupito

For individuals Drupito is a hands off, coding-optional, maintenance-free version of Drupal CMS built with Drupal under the hood. For small orgs it's even more.

Drupito

Programming

Bailey's Retrospective explores:

Missed Fundamentals In Web Development

Git

Forgejo shares its:

Forgejo monthly report - May 2026

404 Media reports:

Microsoft Hacked to Deliver Malware to Claude and Gemini Users

You deserve what you get if you're amoral and dumb enough to use AI.

HTML

Moh Kohn shows:

How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

This x 10,000.

Adam Silver explains:

Why the accept attribute degrades file upload UX

HTMX

Sachin Sharma examines:

Architecting Zero-Dependency HTMX Applications in 2026: Bypassing NPM and Bundlers Completely

HTMX features:

Code is Cheap(er)

The Subtractive, Constraining Engineer is a good approach if you are forced to use horseshit AI.

CSS

Always Twisted demonstrates:

Un-Sass’ing my CSS

Alex looks at:

Rendering a chat thread in CSS and JavaScript

Webkit is:

Introducing the Field Guide to Grid Lanes

JavaScript

NoLoJS has a resource to:

Reduce the JS Workload with No- or Lo-JS options

Use it.

AI

Dries Buyaert has:

Friction, abstraction, and verification

I find it amusing that the papa of Drupal (who I have met, shared a beer with, and respect) is writing about ease of use.

Hence a few days later:

Do AI coding agents recommend Drupal?

I ran across this project this week:

Apertus is Switzerland’s first large-scale, fully open, multilingual language model.

It will be interesting to see where this leads. Although I assume it still has the same environmental concerns. But, maybe Switzerland has shit tons of windmills and hydroelectric power.

Mashable reports:

The AI vibe shift is real: Why the backlash is growing

Bon.

Not to be outdone by their cunterparts at Google, 404 Media reports:

'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company’s AI on Slack

Somehow the lickspittles still manage to work for the techno feudalist overlords.

Other

OpenProject announces:

We have released OpenProject 17.4.1 and 17.3.3

XWIKI shares its:

April and May Pro Apps updates

This week's featured programming tool

Codeberg

A community-led effort that provides Git hosting for free / open-source projects.

Codeberg

And if you don't qualify for use, please self-host Forgejo. And fuck ShitHub!

ActivityPub

Kopper shares:

An outpost vision

Interesting.

Matt explains:

Fixing my ActivityPub and WebMention comments to make them play nicely.

Holos' Tom enables:

Following conversations across the Fediverse

Great stuff.

Mastodon shares:

Mastodon 4.6 for Developers

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

Emissary

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

Emissary

Fediverse

Pure Web Hosting makes:

A case for organisations running their own ActivityPub servers

Jose Murilo has:

Cultural Heritage Digital Collections: Unwelcome Guests on Social Media, Homeowners on the Social Web

Bom, bom, bom.

HootOS opines:

The Bubble Wrap Conundrum; or, The Balkanization Of Social Media Didn't Solve Social Media

IT Notes notes:

Aggressive caching for a Mastodon reverse proxy: what to cache, what to never cache, and why content negotiation will eventually betray you

ActivityPub's papa, Evan Prodromou celebrates:

Mastodon now has a filtering option for notifications from bots

Elk announces:

Finally, Elk v1.0.0 is out!

I ran across Harmony this week:

Harmony

This looks promising for larger existing communities. I like that it's a progressive web app.

Internet Exchange

Due Process: Why Fair Moderation Builds Healthier Communities

Betula is:

Introducing Betula v1.8.0

Holos announces:

Having lists that mix accounts and hashtags is now possible in Holos Social 1.9.0

Owncast belatedly posts its:

Owncast Newsletter May/June 2026

Bonfire

FediForum shares:

Open Social Awards 2026

Bonfire was the only ActivityPub-focused winner. And that's because it's the most innovative thing in the Fediverse.

LoRes Mesh explores:

Your web apps, talking peer-to-peer

Very interesting.

Matrix

Element announces:

Element (and Matrix by extension, the open standard it's built on) has been recognised as a true digital public good by dpgalliance

RSS

Seventeen year-old Frost shares:

RSS And The Difference Between Displaying A Standard And Living Inside One

Great stuff, Frost.

Giulio Magnifico (magnificent name) explores:

Feed RSS dei podcast Rai v2

XMPP

XMPP has:

The XMPP Newsletter May 2026

Mathieui announces:

slixmpp v1.16.0

Other Federated Social Media

Mirthe Valentijn covers:

AT Proto

This one is worth using your browser's translate function. Unless you can read Dutch.

EuroSky Social announces:

We’re now mirroring the did:plc directory - where identities live - on European infrastructure: plc.eurosky.network

Today we’re switching on a high-reliability relay: relay1.eurosky.network

eurosky.social announces mu.social, a new ATProto microblogging app with editing capabilities

Tres bon.

Bluesky announces:

Group chats are rolling out in v1.124 update

Sounds like a clusterfuck.

Along with group chats, we've rolled out a new way to share your profile and invite friends to find you on Bluesky

Uhm, no.

Ege examines:

Integrating standard.site with My Hugo Blog

Daniel's Leaflets continues a series:

Permissioned Data Diary 6: Boring Auth

Mozzius show us:

How standard.horse works

eMail / Newsletters

Andre Chaperon looks at:

The Boring Miracle of Email

Which after the printing press and the typewriter is the greatest technology of all time.

CTAs

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

And please build something for a community! We're building Manade.

Blasts from the past

The Community is the Achievement; the Achievement is the Community

The Programmer's Fulcrum: 5 June, 2026

Reuben Walker, Jr. — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:24:19 +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.

The big news this week was obviously The European Commission's European Technological Sovereignty Package. So, there's much more on that below. It's ten years later than it should have occured, but it's a start. And starts can be directed.

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)

Violet Pixel writes:

Yes, the web has morphed our perception, but I disagree that, "everything needs to generate money because everything is considered valuable." The web hasn't made everyone consider everything valuable, it's pushed people to monetize.

The pressure isn't to create valuable content, it's to create content that sells. Many things that sell have little or no value. Many things with immense value are things you can't put a price tag on (although some people will try).

Worth on the Web

So, join the Open Media Network and do your thing whatever it is. You can be sure it has worth!

Lingua Celta writes:

This essay is explicitly addressed to my fellow technologists: software developers, hobby coders, digital humanists, computer science theorists, and all the other members of this big family of people who do tech.

I want to talk about our community, and why it’s important. I want to suggest that using LLMs to generate content to be included in technology projects, whether that’s code or text or images, or code reviews or proofreading, harms our shared community.

This is similar to what we preach weekly.

Speaking of communities, Ben Werdmuller writes:

The biggest exceptions (to journalistic decline) are local news startups, which are building trust, evolving business models for journalism, and building far more representative editorial rosters.

Most of all, they’re engaging with their local communities. Their constituents know them; that representation and those relationships are how trust is built. And their readers are more loyal because they know they can’t get the context and information they need from anywhere else.

The community-first software era

Fantastic stuff from Ben as always.

CMSs

Amber Weinberg says:

WordPress 7.0 is out, Let’s shut off that pesky AI!

Done. If WordPress had not gone all in on the Fediverse, I literally would have nothing to do with it anymore.

Dries Buyaert explores:

Contentful and the limits of "Buy European"

AKA use open source or eventually get fucked by corporate software. And Germany should block the sale BTW.

Mastro lists:

Four ways to do component-scoped CSS (in Mastro) without a complex build step

This looks to be a fairly KISS option for a CMS.

Simon Repp shares a:

Quick recap of the last week or so in Faircamp 2.0 development

Leaflet

Leaflet announces:

New, for folks doing newsletters on Leaflet

This may only be for Pro plans.

Ghost

Ghost is:

Expanding your social presence

We migrated our Symfony Station Mastodon account into the one here with the new capabilities. So, welcome Symfonistas, Drupalers, and PHP peeps.

Synaps Media announces:

A New Chapter for Synaps Media

And Magic Pages announces:

llms.txt for AI Search in the Customer Portal

IMHO Jannis is slightly amoral (in a nice way) on this topic, so we recommend enabling blocking and disabling crawling. That way you may have a chance to be reincarnated as something other than a cockroach. And BTW we are a client of his company and will remain so (for now) because at least you get to choose (kudos). And sadly, that beats most alternatives.

They also explain:

Ghost, Ghost(Pro), Magic Pages − what's the difference?

Build Awesome

Blades examines:

Minimal 11ty starters

Micro.blog

Micro.blog has:

Standard.site in Micro.blog

More notes on Standard.site

Tools

A Poor Player looks at:

Digital Feudalism and the Rise of Digital Serfs

If you don't want to be a serf, explore and live the Techno Anarchist Manifesto.

Mullvad asks a discouraging question:

Age verification for social media – the beginning of the end for a free internet?

The Internet Exchange explains:

Stifling Speech Through DNS Infrastructure

In big news, the European Commission has:

Commission boosts open and interoperable digital ecosystems for public administrations

Great. Now back it up with adequate funding and large-scale purchasing.

The European Digital Rights Initiative responds:

Europe’s digital sovereignty starts with open source

Free Software Foundation Europe has:

EU Tech Sovereignty: A milestone for Public Code? Now implementation is key

Restack: a new European consortium for a digital Europe

Dries Buyaert shares:

Europe turns to Open Source for independence

Hamish Campbell has his usual spot on take:

The EU tech sovereignty plan

And finally Jos Poortvliet gets into the ambivalent fine details:

The Tech Sovereignty Package encourages and disappoints

If you are an European Union citizen, start pressing your government to walk, not just talk.

Chat / Team Chat

Signal announces:

Signal improves notification reliability for devices without Google Play services

Signal will soon automatically delete call events in disappearing chats

Tuta lists:

Best private Discord alternatives in 2026

Movim announces:

The last few days have been wild!

Browsers

Servo has:

April in Servo: new Android UI, focus, forms, security fixes, and more!

Waterfox announces:

6.6.14 - Web compatibility and ad blocker refinements

Search

Alternative To reports:

DuckDuckGo’s No AI search tool reports huge traffic growth as Google pushes AI results

Erin shares:

Tip: Use DuckDuckGo NoAI as your browsers default search engine

Or better yet pay for Uruky. Or use Mojeek or SearXNG.

Euractiv reports:

European Parliament to ditch Google for European alternative

Super.

Cloud

Jorijn Schrijvershof writes:

Nextcloud is not a Google Workspace clone. That is the point and the trap.

This article is aimed at team users. And I am not sure why it's a trap. Google is the prison.

Writing

LibreOffice shares:

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.4

A Standard in Name Only: What OOXML Transitional Tells Us About Format Sovereignty

Tuta announces:

Tuta joins Euro-Office - one week before launch

Linux / Open Android

Heisse Online reports:

Linux App Summit 2026: Meeting of the Linux Desktop Avant-garde

I wasn't familiar with Bluefin, but anything that makes Linux easier to install and use is great.

Gaming On Linux reports:

Flathub moves to ban nearly all apps and submissions made with generative AI

Fantastic.

KDE and Plasma Design asks:

What Even is Ocean???

Postmarket OS announces:

pmbootstrap: strict builds are now the default

MNT has an update:

MNT May 2026 Update

Hosting / Serving

Elena Rossini continues a series:

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

Jeremy Cherfas explores:

A Server for a Purpose

Zils Norvilis examines:

The Developer’s Way to Track Traffic: Self-Hosting Ackee or Plausible

Especially useful if you have a Rails background.

Siddhant Goel demonstrates:

Self-hosting static sites on a Caddy-powered VPS

This week's featured OMN tool

Decidim

Decidim is a free/libre platform for opensource citizen participation.

Decidim

Programming

Kevin Wagner asks:

Extended Note: Is AI causing a repeat of Frontend’s Lost Decade?

React was the worst thing to ever happen to web development. Until, AI came along. Both are anti-labor, de-skilling, fascist artifacts.

On a similar note, DutchCelt opines:

Front-end doesn't exist

Business Insider reports:

Zig president says AI coding contributions are 'invariably garbage,' so he banned them

Daring Fireball asks:

What Is a Dickover?

Tim Bray looks at:

XML and JSON in 2026

Git

Henderson Reed Hummel demonstrates:

Blocking “recommended for you” items on the GitHub feed

Better yet, don't use ShitHub period.

HTML

Olivier Forget shares:

DOM Patching from a BackflipHTML Template

CSS

Frontend Masters has:

The Fundamentals and Dev Experience of CSS @function

In-N-Out Animations: Dialogs (Part 1/3)

A neat but unnecessary effect.

Sam Hermes explains:

Why I don’t like utility class CSS frameworks

Failwind is the third worst thing to ever happen to web development.

That HTML Blog explores:

Designing an Autogenerated Live Color Scale in CSS

JavaScript

Zil Norvilis says:

Stop Using JS for Everything: Harnessing the Power of Pure CSS in 2026

Absolutely.

AI

Jorijn Schrijvershof has:

Claude Mythos: what Anthropic's cyber model means, and how to stay ahead of it

KISS is also a good security practice.

Emerald Pages reports:

The Great AI Boomerang: Google, Meta, Klarna & More Are Quietly Rehiring the Workers They Fired

Let’s see if the c^nts learn any lessons.

404 Media reports:

But, probably not.

Satya Nadella ‘Not Sure’ Who Said Microsoft Wanted to Make Addictive AI, Is Looking for Guy Who Did This

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

This week's featured programming tool

HTML

Structure your site with simple but essential HTML.

HTML

ActivityPub

Jeremy Herve says:

The web was always social

IT Notes shares a note:

FediMeteo, timezones, and the art of not breaking what already works

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

The Social Web Foundation has:

European Social Sovereignty

Mastodon shares:

Europe's New Tech Strategy Puts Open Source Front and Centre

Following up a post feature here last week, Ecologia Digital asks:

Fediverso ou Web Social?

VM Crawl announces:

The dashboard now shows a heat map of all detected ActivityPub platforms in comparison to Mastodon

The largest number of Fediverse instances are Ghost websites, then Mastodon, and soon to surpass it WordPress sites. This is good.

Alexia's Space examines Fediverse:

Moderation

EnbySpacePerson looks at:

Fediverse migration

Holos announces:

HolosSocial 1.8.1 is available

Elk announces:

Finally, Elk v1.0.0 is out!

And FediLab announces:

Fedilab 3.41.0 is available.

Paths and Patches reports on:

Connected community spaces

Connected Places has:

FR 165 – Fediverse News May 2026

A New Social announces new:

Launches: Credible Exit, Bridged User Notifications, & Fediverse Re-Bridge

Bonfire

Our Manade project is rolling along. So, (as hinted at last week) we have set up an announcement account on the Fediverse via a self-hosted Starling server. It's PHP-based, which is in my wheelhouse.

Follow it at @gardian@social.manade.org.

You can learn more about the project at https://site.manade.org.

Elixir announces:

Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language

Bonfire is written in Elixir which is not in my wheelhouse or even in the neighborhood.

LAUTI announces:

The next step in our ActivityPub implementation is ready

European.social announces:

The European Social Stack

Technology Adventures announces:

SovereignS3nc: Building a Decentralized Network Without a Backend

Very interesting KISS experiment.

Matrix

Sky Schubert shows us:

How to rename yourself on Matrix

Definitely a pain point in open social.

Web Mentions

Dale Mellor extends an:

Invitation to Join a Posse of Webmention Scratch-Builders to Work Towards Interoperability

Other Federated Social Media

Standard.Horse is:

Your printing press for standard.site

Mat Marquis is:

Implementing Standard.Site

Great article.

And Rachel Andrew is:

Joining the atmosphere

pckt answers:

Atmosphere 101: Do I need to make an account?

Hannah explains:

Putting my Neocities blog on ATProto

Daniel's Leaflets explores:

Modeling communities on permissioned data

VMX examines:

Floats on ATProto

Democracy Tech

Fedivariety looks at:

Safeguarding Democratic Debate

Devin Thakker explains:

What Makes Civic Data So Hard to Structure

Tor is:

Supporting those who speak out with Richochet Refresh

eMail / Newsletters

Buttondown announces:

(Private) Notes on your team members

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! We're building Manade.

Blasts from the past