The Programmer's Fulcrum: 24 April, 2026

This post originally appeared on The 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.

Sites/Blogs/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.

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?

AI as a Fascist Artifact

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.

The Power of Understanding

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:

API Introduction

Ghost

Ghost announces:

Native share buttons

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

Eleventy announces:

Collaborative Editing as Progressive Enhancement

Ryan Gittings looks at:

Speeding Up Large 11ty Builds on Netlify

The Tooth goes from:

From HTML to Eleventy

Back to top 👆🏼

Jan Wilderboer explores:

Hello Digital Autonomy

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:

GIMP 3.2.4 Released

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

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.

Framatoolbox

Back to top 👆🏼

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:

Highlights from Git 2.54

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:

Markdown + Astro = ❤️

Enhancing Astro With a Markdown Component

Sune Vuorela announces:

Kookbook 0.3.0 released

HTML

That HTML Blog explores:

Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags

Piccalilli examines:

The end of responsive images

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.

Twig

Back to top 👆🏼

Fedify looks at:

Building a federated blog

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:

8.1.0 — By the Numbers

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.

Emissary

Back to top 👆🏼

The Electronic Frontier Foundation shares:

Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators

Holos announces:

HolosSocial 1.4.0 is available

Sebastiaan Ammerlaan has:

Voorbeeldbrief Fediverse

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 👆🏼

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:

Fediverse Friend Finder

eMail / Newsletters

Buttondown has a great history story:

The US government tried really hard to screw up email

CTAs

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