The Programmer's Fulcrum: 27 February, 2026
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.
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)
There were two great articles this week and I will quote extensively from both.
TechPolicy Press writes:
AI technology is advancing. Anyone thinking critically about large language models and their impact on society now faces a more complex challenge: the agentic turn.
We can oppose large language models on grounds well beyond claims of uselessness. We might examine the AI industry’s political power, its pattern of sloppy deployment based on hype, the dangers of surveillance, the original sin of inhumane data extraction, or in-built biases such as misogyny and racism. It is tempting to add: “and it doesn’t even work!” Online, critics circulate memes of language model mistakes that are good for a laugh and solidarity, but must not be mistaken for users' everyday experiences.
What remains urgently in dispute are the boundaries of utility: what usefulness means, for whom, and under what conditions? At what cost and from whom are benefits derived, and how are benefits and risks distributed? What decisions are quietly removed from public deliberation and handed to automated systems controlled by corporations, governments, and other institutions? That people are using language models doesn’t make criticism of them irrelevant. It makes it urgent.
Stochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI
Ben Werdmuller explains why AI coding can now be useful:
AI has NOT stopped sucking, it's just getting more complex and harder to access whether it's fucked up in terms of useful vs non-usefulness. And it takes a senior engineer to use it properly. More importantly, it will always be amoral and used immorally 95% of the time. There is more on this below in our programming section.
Hamish Campbell writes:
Scale changes everything as human behavior does not stay the same as groups scale. The instincts that helped small tribes survive – loyalty, signaling belonging, defending boundaries, competing for status, consolidating influence – functioned well within natural limits. In small groups, feedback was immediate. Consequences were visible. Power was constrained by proximity and material reality.
But when those same instincts operate at contemporary social scale, inside complex technological societies, like the current NGO-oriented Fediverse, they stop stabilising systems and begin to destabilise them. What once supported survival can amplify fragmentation. What once built cohesion can produce polarisation. What once protected the group can spiral into the extraction and enclosure we start to see now. This is not a moral failure of the human species, it is a predictable outcome of scale.
NLnet and the geekproblem as well as NGO dynamics tend to operate with a narrow philosophy of fund discrete, bounded technical projects that avoid any political positioning to prioritise measurable outputs (code, specs, deployments). This creates structural friction because as infrastructure projects for grassroots media and social organising doesn’t fit neat grant deliverables. Long-term community building is messy and hard to quantify. Native radical or openly political framing scares institutional funders.
So we reinforce a path where money exists, but it flows toward the wrong layers for movement-building. So when does this balance change? This is the hard truth: systems like this rarely change because people ask, they change when people push parallel practices that make the gap obvious.
The uncomfortable reality we need to compost is the current institutional layer probably thinks they are solving the resource problem – just at a different level (protocol legitimacy, policy access, etc.). So the conflict isn’t only “they are wrong” but they are solving a different problem than the one native actors see as urgent.
The core dynamic that is hidden is most people assume power = foundations or organisations. Where the reality is power = maintainers + large instances + narratives + funding gravity. Formal structures, and the little native governance we have mostly follow these forces, and do not in any way balance them.
Grassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.
Where institutional actors see chaos without coordination and feel deep psychological and self serving needs… to stabilise. Both misidentify where decisions actually originate. The deepest unspoken divide is people are defending different emotional survival strategies. Until this is recognised discussions (will) loop endlessly.
The tension that’s pushed back into the Fediverse the last few years
So build the things you need on top of ActivityPub but be ready to fork it, bridge it, or pull out the components you need if the protocol enshittifies. Build for Fediverse clients and your communities.
To use a Taoist metaphor, if the platform or protocol is a stone in a stream and you are water, flow around or over it. Don't butt your head against it until you get frustrated and quit.
And build bridges to CMSs, email, RSS, Non-Bluesky ATProto, Matrix, P2P, Solid Pods, etc. etc. as well.
In other words build useful tools not platforms or even protocols.
OMN shares a vision of how this can work:
A Minimal, Governable Infrastructure for Trust-Based Media Flows
Open Media Network Site CMSs
NiemanLab reports:
Why “magic links” and passcodes are taking over news logins
WordPress
Netribution shares:
Mike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…
Joost de Valk has:
FAIR, WordPress, and Knowing When to Stop
Well, fuck. At least TYPO3 has taken it over.
Make WordPress examines:
SVG icons! 🤸🏾♂️
WordPress Europe wants applications for the:
Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship
Hey WP Europe, get on the Fediverse. You literally have an official ActivityPub plugin for fucks sake.
The Repository reports:
WP Accessibility Day Is Crowdfunding a Booth at WordCamp Europe to Close the EAA Knowledge Gap
WordPress Developer shows us:
How to add custom entries to the editor Preview dropdown
Carolina Nymark provides two new lessions:
Introduction to the Block Bindings API
DelicousBrains looks at:
Architecting Reliable Remote Requests with the HTTP API
Ghost
G. Casqueiro shares:
Why I Chose Ghost (And Why I Keep Choosing It)
John Odolon explores:
Grassroots Economic Organizing
Drupal CMS
Drupal releases:
Back to top 👆🏼
Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools
Organic Maps shares its:
February 2026 Organic Maps update
Terence Eden examines:
Adding OpenStreetMap login to Auth0
F-Droid has:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki says:
Open means open. Or it means nothing.
Browsers
9to5Linux reports:
Firefox 148 Is Now Available for Download with AI Kill Switch and Other Changes
My VPN is Mozilla and I use Firebird, but you should use Zen, Waterfox, or LibreWolf as your browser.
Speaking of, Waterfox announces:
6.6.9 - Security and stability improvements
Or go hardcore with Tor:
New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.7
Cloud
FOSS, Privacy en minder Big Tech looks at:
Writing
LibreOffice announces:
LibreOffice Online: a fresh start
Creative
GIMP has an:
Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer
The Creative Independent shares:
They have an interesting site design.
Linux
9to5 Linux reports:
Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 7.0 Release Candidate
Murena has:
Root looks at:
Sailfish OS na Sony Xperia 10 III: seznámení a instalace
This week's featured OMN tool
Raw Therapy
RawTherapee is a free, cross-platform raw image processing program.
Back to top 👆🏼
OMN Programming
Tech Policy Press explores:
Internet Protocols, Power, and the Rebirth of the Border
This is why P2P bridging and interoperability are critical.
Joan Westenberg has:
The unbearable weight of cruft
I grew up on a farm and we called it cow and horse shit. Somebody had to shovel it out on a regular basis to have a beneficial barn.
Smashing Frames shares:
Acting ethically in an imperfect world
This caused quite a discussion.
My comment is a question. If a certain tech
- was made by shits via shitty behavior,
- and 95% of the use it is put to is shit,
- and those uses are shit for the planet, humanity, and democracy,
- and if 85% of the people using it are shits,
is it a shitty tech only shitty people would use?
Hmmm, anyway IMHO here's how to use AI if you have to (which usually you shouldn't).
Drupal Odyssey has this series:
The Automated Librarian: A Drupal 11 Data Discovery
This is a proper use case for AI that is executed properly.
Markdown
Joan Westenberg says:
The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.
David Duymelinck has:
The AI scraper problem and a possible fix
Are markdown files becoming the new dot files?
If you don't use AI coding you don't have these problems.
HTMX
HashBangCode refreshes:
CSS
CSS Tricks has:
Loading Smarter: SVG vs. Raster Loaders in Modern Web Design
Making a Responsive Pyramidal Grid With Modern CSS
Overly complicated but interesting.
Dear Schepp explores:
Turning a CSS Carousel into a Theme Switcher
Ditto.
JavaScript
CSS Tricks shares:
A Complete Guide to Bookmarklets
This is the type of tool JavaScript should be used for.
AI
Lay Lavish shares:
uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
Other
Filippo Valsorda says:
Fair enough, but I recommend turning off GitHub period and using Forgejo or migrating to Codeberg.
XWiki has new:
Internal documentation | Best practices and how to build it with XWiki
This week's featured programming tool
Platform 6
Platform 6 brings people and organisations together to design and build a co-operative future.
Back to top 👆🏼
ActivityPub
Big news from We Distribute:
Federated End-to-End Encrypted Messaging is Coming Soon
Thrilled to see Bonfire working with Emissary on this effort.
Fedify examines:
Creating your own federated microblog
This is an interesting little project:
Castopod releases:
EvilMartians look at:
Ruby on Whales: Dockerizing Ruby and Rails development
Hey Evils, since Mastodon is written with Ruby why don't you set up an instance.
ActivityPub.space explores:
Global tags and content discovery
This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool
I ran across this one this week.
rdf-pub - generic Activity-Pub Server
It's a possible solution to the JSON vs JSON-LD debate.
Back to top 👆🏼
Fediverse
FediForum aggregrates:
Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop submissions summary
Connected Places shares:
FediLab announces:
The results are in: the community wants HolosDiscover back
Holos Social announces:
Holos 1.0.0-rc-3 has been published.
Frame Travel Roam Capture has:
One year on PixelFed: Reclaiming my Photography on the Algoritm
Mastodon announces:
Matthias Scharwies explores less well known Fediverse platforms:
GoToSocial announces:
Back to top 👆🏼
More
Gonzalo Nemmi reports:
Console based XMPP client, Profanity version 0.16.0, has just been released
Gajim announces:
P2P
Zoron reannounces:
Signal Protocol for a P2P Webapp
Other Slightly Federated Social Media
Paul Frazee looks at:
Kevin Åberg Kultalahti says:
Yep.
ATProto Community has:
AHOY! 2025 - Samuel Newman with How we added video to Bluesky
Democracy Tech
The Free Knowledge Institute announces:
We’re building up the Democratic Tech Fund.
We're creating cooperative alternatives to surveillance capitalism and tech monopolies.
Please make a donation at the open collective link above. I just set up a recurring monthly one.
eMail / Newsletters
Buttondown introduces:
9to5 Linux reports:
Thunderbird 148 Email Client Improves Accessibility in Various Tree Views
Tuta announces:
Email on your terms with Schedule Send in Tuta Mail!
CTAs
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