The Programmer's Fulcrum: 24 April, 2026
Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.
It's your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism. We aim to provide actionable content you can use to destroy Techno Feudalism each week. It has the additional benefit of weakening authoritarianism.
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.
FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.
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Featured Item(s)
Coding.Social writes:
The ActivityPub fediverse is doing great, right?
But do you know the extent to which the fediverse installed base has strayed from the promise and power contained in the open standards documents?
And that it constrains itself ever further into limited application areas, a self-inflicted narrow straitjacket, if we allow this standards divergence to continue?
Did you also know that it is essentially only two (!!) people who are the pillars that try to uphold the entire grassroots standardization process, both volunteers?
We MUST improve our standardization practices to assure a healthy future for the fediverse social network.
Grassroots fediverse evolution
Enjoy this one slowly and do some deep thinking.
Smashing Frames writes:
Our world is built around technological infrastructures that define what we see, who we can talk to, and what information gets presented to us.
We also live in a time of growing fascist threats all over the planet: Many countries have neofascist movements and parties trying to gain power and potentially even get conservative parties to include them in governments. Some even have had success. Fascism is back with a vengeance.
I want to analyze the relationship of fascism and what is called “AI” these days. Is this “technology” that keeps being used to reshape the world around us (for better or worse but dominantly worse) in some way connected to fascism?
Molily writes:
This post describes my personal approach to software development. It highlights different aspects that are not strongly connected but all affected by generative AI – a topic I’m not particularly keen on writing about, but here we are.
Open Media Network - Site/Blog/CMS
Rose Dreams explores:
Indie Web for Artists Who Refuse the Feed
Own Your Web has:
Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators
Consider subscribing to this newsletter.
And as you know, curation is the main thing we do here.
RedBeanIceCream says:
You Don't Need a Tech Stack. You Just Need a Text Editor.
This is a little bare bones even for me.
Patrick Weaver examines:
Building a Web Page That Edits Itself
Bludit shares its:
Ghost
Ghost announces:
Magic Pages announces:
Private RSS Feeds for Your Members
This is a pro member feature.
How to run Magic Pages backups in a local Ghost environment
Build Awesome
Tom MacWright explores:
Eleventy announces:
Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement
Ryan Gittings looks at:
Speeding Up Large 11ty Builds on Netlify
The Tooth goes from:
Back to top 👆🏼
Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools
Jan Wilderboer explores:
Open Source Security says:
Open source was never about trust
Heisse reports:
Paying without Google: New consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles
Nextcloud looks at:
Euro-Office: License compliance and what open source means
F-Droid explores:
Exploring Sustainable Funding for Free Software
Chat
Signal has:
Signal is working on screen sharing on mobile
Phishing attempts on Signal – How they work and how to protect yourself
Apple fixes iOS vulnerability exposing Signal notifications
Browsers
Kevin Boone is:
Announcing Caztor 1.0 – a browser for small-net protocols like Gemini and Gopher
Waterfox announces:
6.6.12 - Security fixes and ad blocker improvements
Cloud
Nextcloud has:
Nextcloud AIO usability updates: Easy management of your apps and containers
Euro-Office: Building momentum
Creative
GIMP announces:
9to5Linux reports:
GIMP 3.2.4 Improves Text and Crop Tools, PDF Export, PSD Import, and More
The Document Foundation examines:
Using LibreOffice for writing screenplays
Linux/Open Android
Phoronix reports:
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Now Available & Powered By Linux 7.0
Pure OS shares its:
PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2026
Ruben De Smet has:
My Sailfish OS Journey: Apps for my daily needs
Bon prenom. ;)
Hosting / Serving
Kevin Boone looks at:
Self-hosting and steamrollers in the small net
This week's featured OMN tool
Framatoolbox
Using Framatoolbox is the first step on the road to your digital autonomy.
Back to top 👆🏼
OMN Programming
404 Media reports:
This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
It’s FOSS reports:
21-year-old Polish Woman Fixed a 20-year-old Linux Bug!
That's inspirational. And awesome.
Geri Reid opines:
Making product documentation work for humans and AI
Git
ShitHub shares:
Tom Ootes announces:
We gaan samen code.overheid.nl bouwen
Markdown
Interconnected announces:
Mist is now open source and looking for interop
CSS Tricks has:
Enhancing Astro With a Markdown Component
Sune Vuorela announces:
HTML
That HTML Blog explores:
Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags
Piccalilli examines:
Interesting, though very extensive.
Frontend Masters says:
The Web Is Fun Again: First Experiments with HTML in Canvas
Web Components
Aaron Gustafson shows us:
Never Lose Form Progress Again
JavaScript
Thibolt shows us how to:
Never Lose Form Progress Again
Frontend Master notes:
AI-Generated UI Is Inaccessible by Default
Just use HTML. Correctly.
AI
Aram Zucker-Scharff says:
The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril
Where’s Your Ed says:
I Will Never Respect A Website
Solid take.
Flying Penguin has:
The Boy That Cried Mythos: Verification is Collapsing Trust in Anthropic
Other
XWIKI shares:
XWiki SAS Q1 2026 updates: new features, improvements, and what’s next
I was excited to see the Nextcloud Cristals extension announcement.
This week's featured programming tool
Twig
Twig is the fast, flexible, and secure modern template engine for PHP.
Back to top 👆🏼
ActivityPub
Fedify looks at:
Cool. I might give it a shot.
Philip Norton releases:
The alpha1 version of my Drupal Mastodon API module
Ben Pate announces:
Activity Intents are now supported (or soon to be) by the biggest Fediverse apps out there
James Endres Howell explores:
Embedding a Mastodon thread as comments to a blog post
ActivityPub for WordPress has:
Good stuff, especially on the API front. I will have to see if it works on Ivory.
This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool
Emissary
Emissary is a Fedi server built for end users, developers, and admins.
Back to top 👆🏼
Fediverse
The Electronic Frontier Foundation shares:
Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators
Holos announces:
HolosSocial 1.4.0 is available
Sebastiaan Ammerlaan has:
Sadly, I can only scrape by in Romance languages. So, this is a translated link for an important idea.
Connected Places says:
FR160 – Everyone Wants Servers And Nobody Wants Servers
The main lesson here is not to be on Bluesky or Mastodon.Social.
Bonfire
Bonfire announces:
Ss part of the Nina Festival, we're hosting a workshop to think with Bonfire
Back to top 👆🏼
More
Element says:
Digital sovereignty is built on an open standard that enables federation
That's a great graphic.
RSS
Ryan Charles shares a:
RSS Anyway Preview: Subscribe to Anything on the Internet
Other Federated Social Media
Chunky Guys announces:
When Bluesky goes down, we go down. That needs to change.
Underreacted has:
ATProto made simple: publishing lexicons
Atmosphere Community announces:
New blog and first release of Atmosphere Community
Stefan Bohacek announces:
eMail / Newsletters
Buttondown has a great history story:
The US government tried really hard to screw up email
CTAs
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Blasts from the past
Previous Symfony Station Posts