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The Programmer's Fulcrum: 16 January, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or you can jump straight to your favorite section.

Website CMSs

Tools

Programming

ActivityPub

Fediverse

More

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

Follow us on the Fediverse

Featured Item(s)

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

TechCrunch reports:

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

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

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

CSID shows us:

How to Build an Organic Community… Inorganically

Open Media Network Site CMSs

WordPress

WordPress has:

What’s new for developers? (January 2026)

Good work on responsive grids.

Dropping support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3.

WordPress Playground Brings Speed, Stability, and Momentum

The [Blueprints Gallery] is a great resource.

The Repository reports:

WordPress 7.0 Planning Continues With Call for Release Squad Volunteers

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

Rich Tabor explains:

Giving my blog a voice

A legitimate use for AI at least.

Ghost

Progressier shows us how to:

Turn your Ghost Website into a PWA

Interesting if you have a large site.

FreeCodeCamp has this course:

How to Build a Custom Ghost CMS Theme

Synaps Media demonstrates:

How to create tables in Ghost?

Useful.

Drupal CMS

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

Founder Dries Buyaert shares:

25 years of Drupal: what I've learned

See lessons 2, 11, 14, and 21.

Drupal has:

Drupal Turns 25 Today

My Drupal buddy, Carlos Ospina shares:

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

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

Micro.blog

Jarrod Blundy notes:

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

Back to top ⬆️

Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools

Hamish Campbell has:

Software licenses and the geekproblem

Anil Dash looks at:

Wikipedia at 25: What the web can be

Chat

Philipe Baez shows us:

How to deploy a Chatmail server

Browsers

This is a fantastic little service!

Just the Browser

Cloud

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

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

Writing

Joplin announces:

Joplin 3.5

Scribus announces:

Scribus 1.7.2 Released

Creative

How to Geek reports:

Latest KDE release includes great updates for Kdenlive and KDE Connect

Kdenlive has all the details:

Kdenlive 25.12.1 released

Linux

Linux Journal reports:

Linux Kernel 6.19-rc4 Released as Development Marches On

Linux Mint announces:

Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” released!

Graphene OS announces:

A new set of Releases

Sailfish OS shares:

Sailfish Community News, 8th January 2026 - New Year

Hosting / Serving

cPanel announces:

cPanel & WHM version 134

Elena Rossini continues a superb series:

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

Cloudflare asks:

What came first: the CNAME or the A record?

This week's featured OMN tool

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

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

Back to top ⬆️

OMN Programming

Infoworld explores:

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

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

Julia Evans examines:

A data model for Git (and other docs updates)

Markdown

Anil Dash explains:

How Markdown took over the world

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

HTML

Terence Eden looks at:

Maximally Semantic Structure for a Blog Post

Thomas Steiner shares:

A polyfill for the HTML switch element

Cool.

HTMHell advises:

Replacing JS with just HTML

Swallow this advice hook, line, and sinker.

HTMX

Mahdi M. explains:

Why You Should Give HTMX a Shot

He also linked out to this resource.

Hypermedia Systems

CSS

Dave Rupert explores:

Focus rings with nested contrast-color()?

CSS Tricks examines:

Playing With CodePen slideVars

W3 Tutorials aks:

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

WebKit announces:

New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes

Manuel Matuzović shares:

Better defaults for popovers

Great tip.

Web Components

ZeroHeight lists:

5 accessibility checks to run on every component

Florian Geierstanger has:

The Missing Link for Web Components

JavaScript

Navanath Jadhav has:

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

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

AI

The Register reports:

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Nice and a great example of Techno Anarchism.

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

This is awesome and I added it to my sites.

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

Please don’t be that person.

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

The Key to Agentic Success? BASH Is All You Need

Other

XWiki announces:

XWiki and Cryptpad communities meetup at FOSDEM 2026

Forgejo announces:

Forgejo v14.0 is available

And OpenProject announces:

OpenProject 17.0.0

This week's featured programming tool

Speaking of OpenProject, it is open source project management software.

Back to top ⬆️

ActivityPub

The Social Web Foundation announces:

New Social Web Working Group at W3C

Connected Places looks at the consequences:

Fediverse Report – #149 – On Protocol Governance

Smarter Articles explores:

Interoperability or Isolation: The Standards Battle Shaping Social Media

Interesting, though long.

ActivityPub for WordPress has:

WordPress Federation: Recap of 2025

On a related note, Alex Masters examines:

ActivityPub Gremlins

Larvitz provides:

Mastodon on FreeBSD: Production-Grade Service Scripts

This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool

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

Back to top ⬆️

Fediverse

Maho Pacheco looks at:

The Forkiverse Experiment and Why Instance Choice Matters

TootWales announces:

Less Clutter, More Cwtch: Introducing the Tŵt App

Renaissance Design opines on it:

Vendor lock-in is hostile to the Fediverse

Social Media Alternatives shares:

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

Jaz-Micael King has:

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

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

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

Bonfire

Bonfire has a case study:

Gifting with Integrity: Federated Digital Spaces for Mutual Aid Networks

This week's featured Fediverse Platform/Tool/Resource

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

Back to top ⬆️

More

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

A Cloud Nihilist explores:

A Model for addressing privacy on ATproto

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

ATProto Community has:

Rashid Aziz: Extending ATproto for private data

Marc Faddoul: Developing the AT infra ecosystem and governance

Devin Ivy: The Shape of Apps to Come

eMail Newsletters

Ghost examines:

Email clipping warnings

Buttondown announces:

Announcement bars for your archives

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# preview.content
Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.


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


IMHO, the best way to do that is to use tools from the Techno Anarchist Manifesto to build your own site(s) to participate in the