The Programmer's Fulcrum 31 July, 2026

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.

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 to your favorite section.

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.

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

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!

Back to top 👆🏼

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:

This Week in F-Droid

Hosting / Serving

MauveRant examines:

Self-Hosting S3 object-storage with Garage

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

Back to top 👆🏼

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

Back to top 👆🏼

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

Back to top 👆🏼

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

Back to top 👆🏼

More

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 .

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