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), Open Social, 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.
If you want some recommended tools see our LESS stack.
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 scroll down 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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Or in the Atmosphere
Again, just copy and paste @thefulcrum.eurosky.social into your Atmosphere app's search field and hit follow.
Featured Item(s)
Again this week with the democracy. ;)
The Guardian writes:
Four pivotal elections in past two weeks show power of grassroots activism to push back against authoritarianism.
Election results in Brazil, Serbia, Israel and US renew faith in resilience of democracy
When you do the little things everyday, you can do big things on some days.
They also write:
AI will become the defining political fight of the 2028 cycle. The future of US politics will belong to whoever voters believe will bring the industry to heel.
Anti-AI populism is the future of American politics
Good.
CMSs
Newsmast reviews:
Four years of Newsmast. Where we came from. Where we’re going
Great stuff, especially on the Scaling Up front. Good to see they've taken up Acorn.
The River Tao shares:
The Reasons I Switched Platforms
As a philosophical Taoist, I am happy to see this switch from MicroBlog to Pagecord.
Pagecord announces:
Publii announces:
Publii 0.48.x: Multiple windows, a rebuilt WordPress importer and a local preview server
Site Search is a new, third-party plugin for blogs and smaller Publii websites
And Pika announces:
Wide & Masonry Image Galleries
I've mentioned earlier that to reduce my LESS promotion hypocrisy I'm moving this site off Ghost and nixing WordPress as the backup in 2027. They are too bloated, clusterfucky, and becoming AI-piled. So the current successor favorite is Bear which is already any experimental backup for us. But, I will also consider Pika and Pagecord. While I love working with flat-file options like Publii and Grav CMS, I am going to KISS and practice what I preach. I will also see if Silex might fit the bill this weekend at the Capitole du Libre conference here in Toulouse.
They announce:
Wulfpaper says:
Making websites shouldn't seem so hard
We agree and it’s why we promote the LESS stack.
WordPress
Wordpress shares:
Usecue asks:
Can WordPress survive the AI era?
Ghost
Synaps Media explores:
Ghost 6.76: custom member fields
Spectral Web Services examines:
A real calendar for a fake store
Magic Pages adds some useful functionality:
Share images: every post gets a link preview in your site's design
Your Ghost site can now be a SocialSpec profile
This is specific to sites hosted by Magic Pages. We turned it on for this site and it works.
Bear
Carol O examines:
Write.as / WriteFreely
WriteFreely announces:
Tools
Browsers
Mozilla looks at:
Open research, stronger privacy: Making Firefox users harder to fingerprint
Waterfox announces:
6.7.8 — iCloud Passwords and a Feeds sidebar
Peerksy announces:
After 3.5 years, #PeerSky v1.0.0 is finally here
From the horse's mouth: "PeerSky is a gateway to the peer-to-peer web, not just a browser. It turns your computer or phone into a node (a server for the network), so pages, files, chats and notes can come from the people who have them rather than from one company’s server. The everyday web works as usual, and alongside it PeerSky carries a full ecosystem of apps built on the same idea: chat, shared notes, file sharing, a music player and, on desktop, a local AI."
Chat / Team Chat
And has:
Chats that live on your devices, not on a server
Google Deepmind is:
Introducing AlphaProof Code: a breakthrough in verifying complex software at depth
The clankers confirm what the humans have been telling you. Signal is safe and secure.
About Signal reports:
Useful.
Cloud
Nextcloud has:
Digital sovereignty for education: Swiss universities migrate to Nextcloud
They left Microslop just in time. ;)
Writing
And:
Euro-Office comes to your desktop with the Nextcloud Office Desktop app
Numérique.Gouv has:
La Fabrique du Libre #8 : Passer au logiciel libre : retour d'expérience de la ville d'Échirolles
The Document Foundation announces:
Announcement of LibreOffice 26.8.3
Linux / Open Android
Motorola announces:
Pricy but it can run GrapheneOS out of the box. That's cool and easier than trying to force it into a phone you own now or another new non-Apple one.
If you aren't a revolutionary or spy, you can also use Fairphone and its e/OS. Which is also more affordable, DIY repair and upgradeable, and from a small business.
And to be fair, Motorola will have more Graphene compatible phones coming in the next few years. Hopefully, lower priced ones.
Commodore says:
Don’t Call it Dumb: The Apps of the Commodore Callback
Damn, I might have to give this to myself for Christmas.
Murena announces:
This week's featured OMN tool
Dokieli
Write, publish, and annotate articles from your web browser.
Programming
Terence Eden shows us how to:
Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically
Love it.
ESLint announces:
ESLint now officially supports linting of shell scripts
I wasn't aware they had moved beyond Javascript. But, they also lint JSON, Markdown, and CSS. Which is good.
Michael Ponders asks:
Isn't It Time for AVIF Everywhere?
Probably.
Git
Forgejo says:
Please make sure that maintenance.strategy = gc is set in your git config
HTML
We published another article in our LESS-inspired Bear Blog "how to" series:
HTML - How to Manage Structure on Your Bear Blog
Simple.
Roma Komarov shares:
My HTML Wishlist: Partial HTML Includes
CSS
David Bushell says:
Chris Coyier has:
Andrian Roselli shares his:
JavaScript
Garten Salat shares:
AI
404 Media reports:
'Reverse Engineer Anything': AI Companies Crack Down on the Coolest Thing People Were Doing With AI
I guess it's time to go with authoritarian Communist AI to use the tools of oppression to unfuck techno feudalism and techshit.
Tech Policy Press says:
Don't Let AI Become the Internet's Gatekeeper
More Programming
OpenProject has:
Organize work your way: Introducing labels in OpenProject
Daniel Stenburg celebrates:
30 years of Internet transfers with curl
This week's featured programming tool
Pulsar
Pulsar is a fork of the Atom editor — assuming its mission of combining hackability with usability.
ActivityPub
Magic Pages looks at:
How we migrated a Ghost ActivityPub account and its 93 followers
Steve Bate shares:
ActivityPub Note: Streams, Collections, and Endpoints
Fabio Manganiello has an update on:
Yonder — An uncompromising ActivityPub server
Ji Woon has:
FEP-c3ab: Referencing existing objects in client-to-server Create
This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool
Emissary
Emissary is a Fedi server built for end users, developers, and admins.
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 techcunts.
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
IFTAS (who I sponsor and so should you) releases:
2026 Social Web Annual Survey & Needs Assessment Report
Connected Places crossed back from the dead on Halloween:
Fediverse Report – October 2026
They make good points about how much it sucks to run a small instance these days. It's one of several reasons we pivoted our Manade project. Individuals face huge obstacles doing this anymore. Which is unfortunate.
Akesi Seli announces:
Raccoon 1.2.0 has been released
Raccoon is a client app for Friendica.
Owncast has:
Owncast Newsletter November 2026
Tŵt Cymru announces:
More
Matthias Pfefferle explores:
He built the plugin for WordPress that handles this.
Lionel Dricot examines:
The anti-marketing aspect of the Gemini network
Belief Driven Design announces:
ATProto
ATProto announces:
Jola.dev examines:
Building an atproto account typeahead search service
Nice move away from Bluesky's implementation.
Boris Mann is:
Working on the Atmosphere, Joining the Atmosphere Community Co-Op
Here's the official announcement:
Introducing the Atmosphere Community Cooperative
Atmosphere
Mumm Ra looks at:
AT Protocol: 46 Million Bluesky Accounts and Only 3 Million a Day Active
Buddy, I slightly edited your headline for clarity. Good analysis.
Skyreader has:
Skyreader update - Discussion pages, sync to Obsidian and Zotero, connect your AI agent
P2P
p2panda announces:
v0.8.0 of p2panda has been released
RSS
Two Waves and a Dot proposes:
Feed HTML - an HTML subset for RSS readers
XMPP
XMPP shares:
The XMPP Newsletter October 2026
Matrix
Matrix has its:
Matrix Governing Board report, November 2026
CTAs
That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.
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