30 Sep 2026

Activity Relay 3.0.1 has been released to fix a couple bugs caused by invalid follower states blocking relay operation.

https://github.com/thystra/Activity-Relay/releases/tag/v3.0.1

Activity-Relay 3.0.1 is a focused reliability release for follower-state handling and relay fan-out.

Fixed

• Prevent stale mutual-follow responses from recreating incomplete Redis follower records.
• Validate follower state before persistence.
• Ignore malformed persisted follower records when loading relay state.
• Isolate invalid or unplannable delivery targets so one bad receiver cannot abort healthy fan-out.
• Keep queue reservations and remaining-delivery counts aligned with deliveries actually planned.
• Harden manual follower acceptance ordering.
• Update Forgejo container/release CI for Debian Trixie’s split Docker client packages.

No configuration or data migration is required.

The 3.0.1 candidate was production-tested on relay.argentwolf.org, including real WordPress fan-out to healthy Friendica and Mastodon receivers while an independently failing receiver continued through its isolated retry path.

Container: ghcr.io/thystra/activity-relay:3.0.1

See docs/releases/v3.0.1.md and CHANGELOG.md for complete details.

The attached files are the exact canonical artifacts produced and accepted by the Forgejo release workflow.

If you find this useful, please consider leaving a tip on my Ko-Fi – https://ko-fi.com/thewolfandtheraven

#activitypub #fediverse #friendica #mastodon #nodebb #relay #relays #relayserver

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 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.

We will be on vacation with friends for the next few weeks so there will not be any The Programmer’s Fulcrums. But, we will be doing some curation on open social. See the CTAs section below for links.

Featured Item(s)

We are tooting our own horn this week with two items.

The first is too short for an article and too long for an open social post, so it’s going here.

A review of WordCamp Bretagne

Even though I am all in on the flat file CMS train now (they aren’t as overlycomplicated, insecure, and susceptible to ensloppification) I attended WordCamp Bretagne last week.

And I am glad I did if only for the opportunity to scout the wonderfully scenic city of Rennes for a summer home. It has an incredible variety of architecture. And it’s like Paris, except less crowded and you can easily get around in it.

But, I also enjoyed the camp. These days I only use WordPress as a backup for the Ghost-based “The Fulcrum”. My client work days are over. But there were several sessions with generic topics still relevent to our work here.

The Gutenberg, Playwright, and accessibility presentations were informative (even with my half-ass French skills). I also saw a oven mitt as swag for the first time. This is France after all. You don’t want to burn your hand when taking your Le Creuset roasting pan out of the oven.

The camp was in a fantastic location in the Convent du Jacobins in Rennes’ centre. It’s very photogenic and has nice furnishings. And there was plenty of caffeine available which is vital at a tech conference.

Here’s a photo gallery including the slightly creepy after-party held at a circus/fair/museum imported to Rennes from Finland. 🎃

My favorite presentation was “WordPress est un logiciel politise” as it was a good overview of WordPress’ political mission. Which is still vital in spite of its founder devolving into a bit of a techcunt and the trend of trying to enterprisize the software.

The community is strong and more importantly decentralised and global. It’s still commited to making publishing more democratic even if it’s no longer the standout choice available to site owners.

Some observations (which match my experience at DrupalCamp Grenoble earlier this year):

• French camps are not as commercialised as U.S. ones (not surprising)
• They are not as beginner-friendly or non-developer-friendly
• The attendees are more varied in age. It’s good to see young people at a PHP-focused event. I noted the same at SymfonyCon 2024. Open standards and mastering them are still important.
• Attendees are there to learn rather than to network. They pay attention to the presentations and ask questions. I think it’s because they have job security as compared to the U.S. where you can be thrown out on your ass in a split second.
• There are still long morning, lunch, and afternoon breaks (again this is France) where you can network if you want.
• WordPress’ community is more AI-sceptical as compared to Drupal.

Unfortunately, Drupal’s founder is all in on it. WordPress’ founder is too busy being a lunatic, so that works to its advatage in this one instance.

My only criticism is that WC Bretagne could up their sign game a little. Expecially their exterior signs.

But, overall it’s an experience I recommend.

We also have a new Bonfire article exploring the account migration process.

Migration Expectations: Coming Home to Bonfire

Sabot Media created a fantastic resource:

Autistici/Inventati’s shutdown is the historical catalyst for this manual, but the lesson is larger than any one project.

Movements and community organizations need to understand the systems they depend on well enough to map them, maintain them, back them up, move them, preserve what matters, and pass that knowledge on.

Become the Thousand Servers

CMSs

Alex Hoyau is:

Merging a big PR into Silex

Sounds great.

Typemill announces:

Typemill 2.27.0: Soloprint Theme

And Faircamp announces:

Faircamp 2

The Guardian reports:

These journalists share vital reporting with thousands of US immigrants – all by text and WhatsApp

Brilliant strategy, but they are flying under the radar on these corporate platforms. And their access could be cut off in a technofascist second. They should have an active open social alternative(s) in place for when that happens.

Juha-Matti Santala shows us how to:

Make your website printable – a short guide

Good stuff.

WordPress

Matthias Pfefferle announces a blog roll plugin:

[Blog role](https://notiz.blog/2026/09/23/blogrolle

Matthias is the genius behind the WordPress ActivityPub and Atmosphere plugins.

IndieWeb

Dead Parrot BBS explores:

Why Personal Websites Are Coming Back

Ghost

Synaps Media has:

Give integrations only what they need: Introducing Protected API Keys

I would assume this is for paid plans.

Build Awesome / 11ty

Simon Cox examines:

Filtered Topic Supplementary Posts

A good HTML lesson.

Back to top 👆🏼

Tools

Holo Ventures examines:

Decent Infrastructure in an Authoritarian World

Great stuff.

Igalia celebrates:

Twenty-Five Years Upstream

Congratulations to the most impactful, important, and innovative opensource organization there is.

Chat / Team Chat

Daniel Gultsch is:

Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free

Browsers

Gianni Rosato makes:

The case against JPEG XL (in browsers)

9to5Linux reports:

Mozilla Firefox 156.0.1 Is Now Available for Download with Various Bug Fixes

Remember to use one of the Firefox forks: Zen, LibreWolf, or Waterfox.

Waterfox announces version:

6.7.4 — RSS returns and AI search controls

Cloud

Nextcloud shares:

Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer: collaboration bringing Euro-Office to the desktop

If you are an individual (as opposed to a team member), LibreOffice is still the better option.

Writing

LibreOffice has:

LibreOffice at FrOSCon 2026

Software Freedom Day 2026: What Freedoms Does Libreoffice Offer

Creative

Aria Salvatrice says:

Let’s stop debating the Gnu Imp
Manipulation Program

Linux / Open Android

F-Droid announces:

F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom

I missed this last month, but Furi Labs announces:

Face Unlock Arrives on FuriOS for the FLX Range

And Jolla details:

A planning day that turned into a hackday

Maemo Leste announces its:

2026 Excalibur release

Rust in Peace shares:

The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want

Witty blog name. 😉

Hosting / Serving

Keith reports:

DigitalOcean has $3 million for DHH (fascist linux) and nothing for CSS-Tricks

This week’s featured OMN tool

Normal Tools

Open a tool, do the thing, leave. No account, no download, and nothing between you and the answer.

Normal Tools

Back to top 👆🏼

Programming

Patrick Brosset has:

My favorite Interop 2027 proposals

Blurry before beautiful: image previews for the web

Ideally, you will have minimized your use of images, optimized them, and have a fast website; so this is not necessary.

Git

Mark Phillip is:

Mirroring the JUnit repository to Codeberg

HTML

Manuel Matuzovic shares:

19½ things you didn’t know about accessibility in HTML and CSS

And Alec Lomas shares:

My Interop 2027 Picks

Terence Eden has:

Some thoughts on HTML’s proposed previewsrc attribute

CSS

Martin Michálek has a good review:

CSS selectors: a complete guide to selectors and combinators

Geoff Graham shares his thanks:

The Front-End Community is Still Alive and Beautiful

Piccalilli shows us how to:

Stop buttons triggering zoom when they’re double tapped

Useful.

Matuzo Vic says:

Your Grid Lanes will likely fail WCAG 2.4.3

Interesting, but should be a very rare use case.

Web Components

Burton Smith looks at:

CSS-Only Custom Elements

AI

Tech Policy Press shares:

What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI

Lionel Dricot aka Ploum has:

Oh yeah, still, we’re here!

David Bushell explains:

I said no and Apple said yes

This is why you should not buy Apple hardware. Use a de-googled Android phone or tablet for now (Linux options are almost there) or a Linux computer.

Here’s how to deshittify this part of your Apple experience.

And for desktop.

This week’s featured programming tool

Markdown

Write for your website.

Markdown

Back to top 👆🏼

ActivityPub

Oscar details the:

Mastodon BOFHers update to 4.7.2

This is what updating a Mastodon instance entails.

This week’s featured ActivityPub featured tool

Social Docs

Docs for ActivityPub.

Social Docs

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 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

The Social Web Community Group announces:

LOLA Portability for ActivityPub (0.3)

Toots.io is:

Introducing Waterhole: an open-source collaborative moderation tool built specifically for Mastodon

Great idea.

MakerTube announces:

MakerTube got upgraded to PeerTube version 8.3.0

And xWiki announces:

ActivityPub Extension 1.7.12 Released

Bonfire

Bonfire reposts:

Making Community Governance Legible: A Semester with Bonfire

Back to top 👆🏼

More

Flotisserie explores:

Old playbook, new eyes

Connected Places explains:

The Algorithm, Apparently Chronological

ATProto

Meri’s Missives details:

(Re)building Roomy in 6 months

I think Roomy is going to be another nail in the coffin of my vision for the Manade project. But, that’s OK.

Plus, Blacksky announces:

Acorn is officially open

50 Shades of Protocol presents:

Atmosphere in a Box – All your sandbox needs

David Bushell is:

Removing the fancy button

Boris Mann examines:

LaSuite Apps + Atmosphere Accounts

Tres cool.

Charlotte Som looks at:

Designing a storage engine for AT Protocol backlinks

Atmosphere

Blacksky is:

Building a Culture of (Digital) Safety

ATProto announces:

MySky: Open, Controllable Feed Infrastructure for the Atmosphere

P2P

Worm-Blossum announces:

Sneakerweb 1.2.0

The Random Consortium has:

“My Data, My Business Avengers” — The Privacy Suite that Fights Back

I don’t know if this is revolutionary or batshit crazy. 🙂

Webrings

Zachery Huang says:

I Love Webrings

We are members of the two Webrings in our footer.

Webmentions

Matthew Weier O’Phinney looks at:

Webmention support

Konstantin explores:

Webmentions: the nice things we have

XMPP

Daniel Gultsch asks:

Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?

Movim shares:

Movim 0.35.1, time to upgrade!

Matrix

Matrix answers:

Is Presence Fixed Yet?

Element reports:

Element partners with Arawa to bring sovereign, open-standard federated communications to French local authorities

Tres bon.

Sky’s (whoever the fuck they are) Blog shares:

A Thousand Newlines: Matrix Spam, #3 — We are so back!

Peeps, on your site please explain who you are. Websites aren’t anonymous.

Democracy Tech

Slow News shares:

The Good Ideas of Solidarity Tech

If you can, attend:

Decidim Fest 2026

From the Decidim, a Techno Political Network for Participatory Democracy: Philosophy, Practice, and Autonomy of a Collective Platform in the Age of Digital Intelligence (what a title) book:

… contemporary societies face the double challenge of the crisis of representative democracy and the rise of new forms of capitalism.

Under platform capitalism (techno feudalism), tech corporations have a growing influence on people’s lives. If access and control to and online activities are key assets, algorithms turn them into wealth and power over people and institutions, challenging democracy as we know it.

This is what we call “algorithmic governance”: a growing form of technologically mediated technocratic governance of social and economic life, frequently with a neoliberal (heading toward fascist) purview.

The value of Decidim stands out in a context where common collective intelligence, democracy and participatory governance face the challenge of corporate artificial intelligence, oligarchy, and algorithmic governance. A context where public and common institutions require democratic infrastructures to overtake market-driven innovation in solving the complex challenges of our times.

Decidim contributes to the strengthening of innovative forms of commons-oriented economy, public-common partnerships, and participatory democracy.

This is a perfect illustration of what we are up against. So bookmark or save the illustration for future reference. We need to move from the top right corner to the bottom left corner.

Decidm is a tool for local governments, public organizations, unions, cooperatives, higher education, and other large non-profit groups to combat algorithmic governance, big tech, oligarchs, and authoritarians.

The Techno Anarchist Manifesto is a resource to help you as an individual achieve similar results.

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 the Atmosphere for daily coverage.
• Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community! We’re painfully nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

Alt...

Header illustration with text over dark background of stars, spaceship, and astronaut.

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 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.

Two notes for this week:

1. I’m attending WordCamp Bretagne this week so coverage of some of Friday’s happenings will slip to next week.

2. We switched and customized our theme to make our home page a little more accessible.

Featured Item(s)

Smashing Frames writes:

Omarchy should not matter. But sadly it does. As a power grab.

(It) is part of the new fascism. But it’s also a good case study about how little political resilience is built into FLOSS. The libertarian roots have not only made the whole movement ready for the taking by corporations but also by fascists.

And sadly many influential organizations in that space are not up to the task of putting their foot down.

Power Grab

They also write:

There has been this shift towards equating “progress” with “technological innovation and development”: society is moving forward if tech produces more shit. You might have picked up on me mentioning that today’s vision of the future is just a thinner iPad every few months.

But if “progress” – which is a political term about values that one aims to manifest or express or expand in the world – is just replaced with following PR messages about whatever tech wants to sell next, that does not only make the space of possible futures paperthin, it also puts massive amounts of power into tech’s hands.

And I don’t just mean economic and political power (which is also true and needs to change massively, rapidly and aggressively). In this context I mean narrative power.

Rediscovering The Spark

CMSs

Patrick Brosset says:

I’m worried about the web

This is why the Servo project is so important.

404 Media reports:

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

There’s a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet

Meanwhile Tech Policy Press reports:

Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.

The first thing the author needs to do is get the fuck off Reddit.

Terence Eden shows us:

How to get a DOI for your blog posts

For you researchers out there.

Candost opines:

Magazines are superior products to newsletters

They are certainly more enjoyable.

Alex Hoyau has an update on:

My work on Silex Desktop to make it forge-agnostic

I will be attending Alex’s presentation at Le Capitole du Libre. It about de-clusterfuckifying WordPress by using Silex as a decoupled frontend.

WordPress

TechCrunch reports:

Sources say Automattic’s board is out after failed attempt to oust CEO Matt Mullenweg

On a more joyous note, WordCamp Bretagne shares:

Découvrez Gwen, le Wapuu officiel du WordCamp Bretagne 2026

Yes, WordPress is a clusterfuck. But at least it’s cute.

On a non-cute note, Internet Exchange explains:

What It Means to Lose Autistici/Inventati and NoBlogs

Back to top 👆🏼

Tools

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras has a great book review:

On building Digital Solidarity

The day it’s available in English or French, I’m buying.

About Signal reports:

Signal registration without a phone number now available in Android beta

Browsers

Servo has:

Servo had a busy end of August and start to September

Your Donations at Work: One Year of Sponsored Servo Development

Waterfox announces:

6.7.3 — Auto-hide vertical tabs and appearance fixes

Where Waterfox stands on AI and LLMs

I think most “anti-AI” positions are really anti-GenAI slop positions. As the author notes machine learning etc. has been around for decades. Still, modern “AI” is intentionally labor weakening fascist techshit based on theft and created by and for techbros. But perfection is not possible and this shit is unavoidable, so keep it as local and open source as possible and minimize your use of LLMs. Avoid LLM-built tools as best you can. The environment is already fucked.

Writing

LibreOffice has:

LibreOffice 26.8 and the languages for which nobody is paid

New “LibreOffice Expert 2026/2027” magazines available for schools and local communities

If you want a personal copy, you can buy one from the publisher.

LibreOffice 26.8 and interoperability: preserving what cannot yet be read

Nextcloud announces:

Collabora: Landlock adds a third, tougher sandbox tier

Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer: Autonomy for Teams, Office on desktop, a fresh take on Photos

There are some good Markdown improvements in Nextcloud Text.

Cryptpad reveals its:

Summer 2026 status

They are doing good work in the government tech sphere.

Scribus has:

Added a Scribus 1.6.x quick tour on the main menu

Joplin announces:

Your notes and AI: privacy first

If you have to use AI (and you shouldn’t) this is the way to do it. At least you can use an open model and keep it local with only your data and the individual tools you select.

Creative

The Counterforce shows us:

Punk A.I. Artists are on the Rise: How to Suffocate the Slop in Your Scene

9to5Linux reports:

Shotwell 0.33 Open-Source Image Viewer for GNOME Is Here with GTK4 Port

Linux / Open Android

9to5Linux reports:

Linux Mint Devs Introduce New EPUB Reader and Calendar Apps

Jolla announces:

Change on Jolla Phone memory configurations going forward

LINux on Mobile explores:

MCF20: Flatpak support, sorta, kinda

It’s important for Linux Phones to become a thing. More so than with desktops.

F-Droid has its weekly update:

Routing you to FLOSS

Gina Plat notes:

European governments are starting to support alternative mobile app stores

Digital sovereignty is good. Digital solidarity and Techno Anarchism are better.

Hosting / Serving

The Association for Progressive Communications reports:

GreenNet celebrates 40 years: A pioneering internet service provider still building digital communications for everyone, everywhere

This week’s featured OMN tool

OmniTools’ PDF Tools

Boost your productivity with OmniTools, the ultimate toolkit for getting things done quickly!

PDF Tools

Back to top 👆🏼

Programming

NLnet Labs explores:

Maintaining the love for coding in the time of AI

If your proposed contribution to an opensource project was mainly developed with AI, you may think you’re a developer. But, you’re not. You’re a cunt.

David O’Brien says:

Users of assistive technologies need to know the names of interactive elements on the web

The Open Media Network explains how:

The deathcult is selling the future as techshit

Andy Bell has a rake on the CSS situation:

You’ll miss publishers when they’re gone

Git

Gina Plat also notes:

Sweden is choosing Forgejo for their digitally sovereign government code platform

Markdown

Random Thoughts on Leadership and Technology shares:

Markdown – All the Way Down

HTML

Fractal Interests examines:

HTML Template For

CSS

Always Twisted has:

… And That’s My Rank! 2027 Edition

Master.dev says:

It’s All About The Permissions Recovery

Vale notes:

CSS-TRICKS in Limbo

It was doomed the day Digital Ocean acquired it. And it’s been dying a slow death since.

In effect the Master.dev blog has taken the CSS-Tricks role.

The Jacobin asks:

Is There a Way Out of AI Doomerism?

Taggart Tech says:

Everone Is Lying To You For Money

And Connected Places says:

AI watermarking has a decentralisation problem

Other

OpenProject is:

Training the next generation of IT specialists: Using OpenProject at the Gutjahr Vocational School

XWiki announces:

XWiki 18.8.0RC1 has been release!

This week’s featured programming tool

XWiki

XWiki innovates with “Structured Wiki” and delivers high knowledge features.

XWiki

XWiki is a little much for us. But, I did manage to get DocuWiki added to our Manade project this week. 😉

Back to top 👆🏼

ActivityPub

Terence Eden shows us:

How to send an updated user profile to Mastodon and the Fediverse

IFTAS shares a fix for:

“Boom Protocol” Spam

The GoActivityPub Library is working on:

The vocabulary/lexicon generation

Vlac Log shares:

A couple quick notes on ActivityPub

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

Roel Roscam Abbing has:

Nobody’s fault, everyone’s problem?

If you run a public instance, you have a responsibility to your users and the wider Fediverse. Provide robust moderation. At least against spam.

Fedilab Apps shares the:

Experience of building FediHood

Magic Pages explains:

Why your Ghost site’s old posts don’t show up on Mastodon

Also, your main Fediverse account should not be Ghost-based as their implementation is mediocre at best. Self-hosted or Go To Social are better bets. Maybe even a Mastodon account. 😱

PeerTube announces:

PeerTube 8.3 is out!

Framablog has:

reseauCulture.fr : le monde de la culture s’organise sur le fediverse

Back to top 👆🏼

More

ATProto

ATProto France shows us:

Comment utiliser une app Atproto en sécurité

Building [at] Habitat shares:

Habitat’s road to release: 06 commenting

Graham Marlow looks at:

Decentralized identity and ATProto

Atmosphere

Discord alternative, Roomy announces:

Roomy Pro

Roomy Docs

Skyreader has:

Skyreader update – Reading Rooms

Jacky Alciné shares:

‘There’s More Black People Over There’: False Equivalences in Platform Distribution and Gimmicks of Platform Capitalism

Great stuff.

RSS

Two Waves and a Dot opines:

RSS has a business problem, not a technical one

XMPP

XMPP shares its:

The XMPP Newsletter August 2026

Matrix

AdullAct reports:

Local governments are regaining control over their digital communications with Matrix (image pdf)

En francais text

Democracy Tech

I began reading the book, Decidm, a Techno Political Network for Participatory Democracy: Philosophy, Practice, and Autonomy of a Collective Platform in the Age of Digital Intelligence, this week.

Decidm is a quasi implementation of both the Open Media Network and Techno Anarchism but from a more formal governing practice. It is a democratic tool for participatory democracies like a city, NGO, or a collective.

You can learn more about Decidm here.

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 the Atmosphere for daily coverage.
• Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community! We’re painfully nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

Alt...

Header illustration with text over dark background of stars, spaceship, and astronaut.

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 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.

This week marks the beginning of the earliest incarnation of this site, Symfony Station. It also began our cross-posting to Dev.to. That was five years ago when mass enshittification and AI menacingly loomed just over the horizon. The reason I had gone to web development bootcamp was that I knew they were coming and needed some skills to fight them.

Personally, I’m in a better place now. But, unfortunately tech isn’t despite our efforts here. So, let’s kick it up a notch.

Featured Item(s)

Sabot Media writes:

For twenty-five years, Autistici / Inventati showed what it could mean for movements to build and control their own communications infrastructure. Its loss should not send everyone searching for the next single service to replace it.

It should send us looking in a hundred directions.

A/I may be ending. The story is nowhere near over.

This is what we preach weekly.

Brennan Day writes:

We can create a more human web right now. The world is in dire straits …

There are those who see the act of webmastery as “only” a hobby and pastime—and I say this is not mutually exclusive to world-saving. The personal is political. Our ability to maintain our joy and ourselves is, itself, resistance.

Start as you are, with what you have, while you still have time to do so.

Exercise your innate human right to create.

Be a developer. Be a designer. Be a writer. Be a systems administrator. Be a philosopher. Be a Webmaster.

It is the most punk rock, anti-establishment, liberating thing you can do in the 21st century. And yeah, it is fucking awesome.

WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone

We also preach this weekly.

Simon Tisdall writes:

It’s no surprise some analysts say we are already in the midst of the third world war, but ordinary people have more power than we think.

The world is being driven to the brink by thugs and dictators, but there is a route to a brighter future

Wow, this is depressing up till the last 2 paragraphs. But, we have to keep fighting in order to preserve our sanity.

So, read from here till the end of the TAM and do your part to unfuck the world.

CMSs

Soulcruzer says:

Take back the web. Make it weird again

Bob Sassone’s site’s 30th Anniversary inspired their article.

And it’s truly inspiring. Great to see.

Unfortunately, Cavalette shows us:

How to to back up your data (currently) on A/I services

The type of post you never hope to see. Fuck all the Trump clowns and cunts.

There’s a new ATProto competitor for Ghost and Substack:

Writizzy

Non-opensource and similar to Offprint. But, non-AI and European.

WordPress

I will be at WordCamp Bretagne next week (mainly to scout Renne as a summer home) so say bonjour si vous sont cette-la. Sessions that I will definitely attend include the Gutenberg, Web Spaghetti, and Integrations ones.

It will be interesting to see what everyone thinks of Matt getting thrown out of AutoMattic on his ass.

Ghost

Spectral Web Services explores:

Avoiding duplicates on complicated homepages

Back to top 👆🏼

Tools

Framablog has a book review:

Publication : Alternatives & Struggles

Chat / Team Chat

About Signal reports:

Signal now lets you record much longer videos in the app

Movim announces:

Movim 0.35 “Thiele” is out!

Browsers

Waterfox announces:

6.7.2 — Improvements to tree tabs and the vertical sidebar

There are similar improvements in its Android app.

Search

Xamanismo Coletivo shares:

One guy in Sweden built a search engine to fight Google, and it works

Cloud

Nextcloud shows us:

How to set up UnifiedPush on Android for Nextcloud Talk: push notifications without Google Play Services

Tuta examines:

Tuta Mail, Tuta Calendar, & Tuta Drive: Development steps

Writing

Joplin explains:

What’s new in Joplin 3.7

You can publish a notebook as a website now.

On a related note, Glyphack has:

Share Obsidian Notes To A Blog

Creative

Libre shares:

Announcing Plasma Studio

GIMP announces:

GIMP 3.2.6 Released

Linux / Open Android

Fedilab Apps says:

Choose F-Droid

Fuck Google.

Alternative To reports:

GrapheneOS plans to overhaul the bundled AOSP apps, including messaging with RCS support

This week’s featured OMN tool

BentoPDF

The PDF Toolkit built for privacy is now opensource.

BentoPDF

Back to top 👆🏼

Programming

Sage Journals published:

‘Digital Public Infrastructure’: Cultural hegemony and states’ technological dependence

As this and the A / I situation demonstrate, we need to build our own infrastructure. So, pay attention to our More section each week.

Fedilab Apps shares:

So Google refuses to delete my dev account

Terence Eden says:

The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

Ah, our online companions: techno feudalists, techno fascists, AI and Crypto Bros, and (the most honest) criminals.

On a related note, Erlend Sogge Heggen says:

Making software hurts now

That’s because unregulated capitalism will @$$-fuck up any and everything.

David Bushell exposes:

CodePen: exposed!

Tongue-in-cheek. 😉

Henri Bergius goes EUPL:

I changed my license

Git

Justin Wernick is:

Saying Goodbye To My Git Server’s CGit Frontend

HTML

Jens Oliver Meiert reports:

2026: 2 of the Global Top 200 Websites Use Valid HTML

Since most “developers” are tech and AI bros, this tracks. Unfortunately.

CSS

Lea Verou says:

The best dark mode toggle is probably none

And the best dark mode is light mode.

Web Awesome thinks:

Your Design System Should Style Your Words, Too

Web Components

Master.dev explores:

Custom Scrollbar Component In 2026

JavaScript

And:

React Now Rusted All The Way Out

It speeds up React builds. What speeds things up even more is not using the horseshit at all.

Other

Benjamin Eberlei examines:

PHP to get the job done in 2026

Interesting and the most important point is this:

A second major benefit of PHP is its completly open governance model, its truly free software without corporate interests in control. As my friend Sebastian recently wrote: Digital Sovereignty is written in PHP.

In regards to ethical AI use in PHP, I wrote this article about it.

Sourcehut has:

Changes to SourceHut’s terms of service regarding LLMs

Fantastic!

Forgejo announces:

Forgejo Runner v13.1.0 is available

Forgejo 16.0.4 and 15.0.8 were just released

XWiki has:

July and August Pro Apps updates

Release Notes for XWiki 17.10.13

OpenProject announces:

OpenProject integration app for Nextcloud released in versions 3.2.0 and 2.12.0

This week’s featured programming tool

Twig

Twig is the fast, flexible, and secure modern template engine for PHP.

Twig

Back to top 👆🏼

ActivityPub

The Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG) works on ActivityPub standards:

Current SWICG Task Forces and their deliverables

It’s slow as fuck. But, at least its moving forward now. The end to end encryption, groups, and forums efforts are vital.

Matthias Pfefferle notes:

FEP-d1cb: Same-origin actor re-identification

Matthias does the most impactful work in the AP community IMHO. We need 200 more of him.

Terence Eden asks:

ActivityPub – Is it worth defending against replay attacks and message/signature time skew?

Spielleitung shares how to block a registration bot:

Prevent “BoomProtocolProbe” from registering

This week’s featured ActivityPub featured tool

Starling

Starling is an ActivityPub server that can actually exchange posts, follows, profiles, replies, likes, and boosts across the Fediverse with Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, GoToSocial, PixelFed, and other ActivityPub-compatible platforms.

Starling

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

IFTAS has:

Updates to IFTAS Denylists and Access Options

Bonfire

Bonfire presents:

Sovereignty Is More Than a Server: Public Digital Commons with Bonfire

Back to top 👆🏼

More

ATProto

Jola.dev looks at:

Migrating your Bluesky account the hard way

Building AT Habitat shares:

Habitat’s road to release: 05 adopting opensocial

This appears to be a promising Atmosphere alternative to my Manade project.

Speaking of, atproto-spaces-alpha-updates has an update:

Breaking Changes around the simplespace API

Erlend Sogge Heggen explores:

Atmospheric events commons

Atmosphere

Aaron Ross Powell examines:

Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism

Which is why we need more private autonomous online communities. That’s what I’m exploring with Manade.

MeTacheles has:

W Social Netzwerk: Fake-Zahlen, Rassismus und Totenstille!

Plus there’s this kind of horseshit:

You can’t currently move from/to W without help from a dev

You may have to be logged into the Atmosphere to see this. Anyway, if you are a mark that got grifted into W, just delete you account. Hopefully, no one will ever find out you signed up. Except every company they will share your information with.

Atmosphere Conference News announces:

AtmosphereConf 2027 Organizing is Underway

Happening somewhere in Europe. ???

RSS

Bunnies in PCKT says:

RSS is still my preferred feed format

Mon aussi.

FreshRSS announces:

FreshRSS 1.30.0

Democracy Tech

Internet Exchange looks at:

Building Online Communities We Can Keep

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 the Atmosphere for daily coverage.
• Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community! We’re painfully nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

Alt...

Header illustration with text over dark background of stars, spaceship, and astronaut.

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.

This post originally appeared on The Fulcrum.

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 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.

Featured Item(s)

Iris Meredith writes:

So, when I hear a tech person say that something’s “just a tool”, I can’t help but read it as an unwillingness to take responsibility, as an industry, for what we put into the world and for what we do to ourselves. Tools, unfortunately, simply cannot be the neutral, separate thing that so much of the tech world would like them to be, and pretending otherwise, let alone telling people affected by the tools that they’re simply using them wrong, is an abdication of our moral duty to avoid, inasmuch as is possible, doing harm. We really ought to do better.

There’s no such thing as Just a Tool

There is such a thing as TechBros, unfortunately. And their cuntier cousins, AIBros. And apolitical is a synonym for fascism-friendly. At least straight-up Nazis aren’t hypocrites.

Social Coding Commons writes:

… in modern society, generally speaking, we give too much credence to the technosphere. We take the idea that innovation equates to societal progress as a given, to which we must subsequently adapt ourselves. We tend to turn things around, where “digital transformation” suddenly means how humans must adapt their lives to new technology that comes to disrupt it. And not the other way round.

The Fediverse has evolved purely as a technosphere (unfortunately).

Paradigm shift to the Prosocial web

A fan-fucking-tastic piece.

On a relate note, Hamish Campbell has thoughts on Open Governance Bodies / Building:

Power stays with the people doing the work

This is a good explanation of how digital communities and projects can govern themselves.

And we published an article this week, where I write:

The premise of this article is that developing or using ActivityPub tools, participating in the Fediverse, publishing to the Indie Web / Open Media Network, and adopting the arsenal of the Techno Anarchist Manifesto are the new punk.

ActivityPub, the Fediverse, the IndieWeb/Open Media Network, and Techno Anarchism = Punk Rock

CMSs

Jan Miksovsky explores

Origami Projector: a Glitch-like app for site editing

A great idea. Although only available on newer Macs unfortunately.

I also ran across AnyPub, an editor for Standard.Site publications.

CSS Tricks explores the:

WordPress PHP-Only Block Registration

Good news for those migrating legacy sites. And avoiding the shit known as React, at least some of the time.

Why Do I Write This? writes:

Neocities is for nostalgic masochists

Seems about right.

Scraps! expounds:

On Atmospheric Stacks…

Mark W.Rites says:

Alt Text is the Ocean You Thought Was a Pond

Faircamp announces:

Faircamp 2.0

And Vidnight has:

I disagree with the take that the internet is dead

Enjoy the open web peeps. It helps keep me sane. And I am happy to see this from a 20 year old. 🙂

Ghost

Spectral Web Services has:

I accidentally built an image library for Ghost

This should be in Ghost core. It sucks that it isn’t.

Their competitor, Magic Pages has:

A press of your “own”

Good stuff.

Back to top 👆🏼

Tools

Tuta has:

Digital Sovereignty Study: EU IT leaders are quitting U.S. Big Tech

U.S. Sanctions against Autistici / Inventati are the next wake-up call for digital sovereignty

KDE examines:

KDE For Digital Sovereignty

NLNet urges:

Apply for funding before November 3rd 2026

They are going the correct direction with AI use, which is to severely restrict it.

Organic Maps has:

Multi-selection for bookmarks and tracks, a CarPlay dashboard, hiding tracks on the map, and readable share links in the August 2026 update

Threat Model shows us:

How to migrate from 1Password

VPNs

Mullvad is:

Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead

Chat / Team Chat

FluffyChat shows us:

How to use end-to-end encryption in FluffyChat

About Signal reports:

Signal introduces new notification settings for Android and Desktop

Browsers

Servo shares:

July in Servo: more platforms, faster canvas, web fonts in SVG, and more!

9to5Linux reports:

Mozilla Firefox 155 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

Remember to use Firefox forks like Zen, Waterfox, or Librewolf.

Webkit has:

Submit your ideas for Interop 2027

Fixing Top-Level Await in Safari

Remember not to use Safari for anything you want kept private. And preferably not at all.

Cloud

Nextcloud shows us:

How to set up UnifiedPush on Android for Nextcloud Talk: push notifications without Google Play Services

Fuck Google!

Writing

Joplin shares:

What’s new in Joplin 3.7

The new table editor in the Markdown editor is awesome. The addition of AI features sucks. At least they are optional you can use a local model.

LibreOffice announces:

Yes, no AI is now a feature

Bon. AI should almost never be used, but if it is (translation), it should be as an optional extension.

Creative

Kdenlive announces:

Kdenlive 26.08 is out!

9to5Linux reports:

OpenShot 4.0 Open-Source Video Editor Officially Released, Here’s What’s New

Audacity 4.0 Open-Source Audio Editor Officially Released, Here’s What’s New

Linux / Open Android

And:

Debian Project Formalizes Responsible Use of Generative AI

Like Linux core, Debian chooses to slowly ensloppify and likely enshittify.

F-Droid has its weekly summary:

Searching complexity and Taler update

This week’s featured OMN tool

Dokieli

Write, publish, and annotate articles from your web browser. Your content stays yours.

Dokeli

Back to top 👆🏼

Programming

Typemill expounds:

On the way to automate user manuals and knowledge bases

This is a legitimate use of local AI. It’s the second most legit use after translation.

Git

The Linux Foundation has a useful course for KISS developers (rare for them):

Share Smarter GPU Resources and Master Git
from First Commit to Merge Conflict

Their learning platform subscription is not cheap, but this might be worth a one month one while you finish the course.

HTML

Vasilis van Gemert explores:

What are we not talking about anymore?

Master.dev examines:

New Things You Should Know About HTML Here in Mid 2026

Great stuff.

Vale says:

initial-scale is dead!

As in unnecessary.

JavaScript

Ollie Williams explores:

Highlighting a range of text inside an input or textarea

A rarely needed though legitimate use of JavaScript.

AI

So AI is now fucking over tech conferences as well:

Lettre ouverte pour la survie des événements techniques en France

And freelancers:

Freelancers are getting buried with ‘soulless’ AI slop cleanup: ‘It’s a shame we need to do it’

One of the main purposes of AI is to drive down the cost of labor (it’s a fascist artifact). And these are the consequences when you use it.

Other

OakChris1955 looks at:

Migrating from Cloudflare Pages to Codeberg Pages wasn’t that difficult, actually

I have used Codeberg to deploy a test Publii site. And it worked great. But, you were limited to one site at that point.

This week’s featured programming tool

Markdown

Write for your website and documentation. And not for AI.

Markdown

Back to top 👆🏼

ActivityPub

ActivityPub for WordPress shares:

9.3.0 — Modern Signatures and a Summer of Security Reports

This is a perfect example of what an update announcement should be. 😉

Social Coding Commons opines:

I argue that ForgeFed and ActivityPub should support multi-types as specified in Activity Streams

They are correct and this provides an insight into why AP development is so slow and convoluted. And to why there is much less innovation in the Fediverse as compared to the Atmosphere with ATProto. ActivityPub is just more anarchic.

Not that its a bad thing, as I point out in my featured article. Plus, it’s definitely more enshittification-resistant.

Plus, core ATProto has much more money and developers behind it than ActivityPub does.

Terence Eden has:

A reasonably practical guide to validating RFC 9421 HTTP Signatures for ActivityPub in PHP

ActivityBot is the recipient of an NLnet grant!

In effect he’s creating something similar to Starling for bots. And it’s for use as a developer learning tool.

A review of the ActivityPub book.

Andros Fenollosa explores:

Building a decentralized bulletin board (and accidentally reinventing Nostr)

Abuuba announces:

abuuba 1.0 is out

Interesting.

Mobilizon needs you:

Version 5.2.5 is coming

This week’s featured ActivityPub featured tool

ForgeFed

ForgeFed is a federation protocol for software forges and code collaboration tools for the software development lifecycle and ecosystem.

ForgeFed

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

TootSDK announces:

A new release of TootSDK – 23.3.0

Owncast announces:

Owncast v0.3.0 has been released!

Fedilab Apps has:

FediHood now lets you sign up and log in with your Mastodon account

FediHood now supports Lemmy

This definitely makes it more useful.

Mastodon announces:

We just released Mastodon v4.7.1, v4.6.7, v4.5.17 and v4.4.24

And the Real Grunfink announces:

I’ve just published version 2.95 of Snac

Bonfire

Bonfire has:

Bonfire 1.0.7: what’s new and what’s next

Great stuff.

Building shared infrastructure for the Fediverse

Very important because -> see my comments about the Social Coding Commons piece above.

Back to top 👆🏼

More

Andros Fenollosa notes:

There is no such thing as full decentralization

A great overview and explanation.

Open Risk Management goes down an empirical rabbit hole:

Towards a Graph Calculus for Decentralized Social Networks

マリウス shares:

Hyperuplink: Discuss like it’s 1998

Cool.

ATProto

Venoom examines:

Decentralizing social media using ATProto and Matrix (venoom)

Eventuallycoding has:

Le piège de la transparence par défaut sur Bluesky et le protocole ATProto

Skyreader shares the:

Skyreader Vision

Atmosphere

Structural Integrity explains:

W Social is a textbook case for everything wrong with digital sovereignty

Roomy looks at:

Federating friendly spaces

P2P

Worm-Blossum shares its:

Week 35 (2026)

Webrings

Ross Floate has:

I built a new website. It’s happiest when you leave.

Very cool. I am going to try to replicate this on one of my sites.

XMPP

The Association for Progressive Communications has an interview:

Libervia on building an all-in-one communication platform grounded in the right to privacy

Daniel Gultsch celebrates:

Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

Matrix

Matrix has:

Neo Nominated for Open Source Competition

Is presence fixed yet?

This Week in Matrix 2026-09-04

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 the Atmosphere for daily coverage.
• Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!

And please build something for a community! We’re painfully nurturing Manade.

Blasts from the past

Previous Battalion Posts

Previous Symfony Station Posts

Alt...

Header illustration with text over dark background of stars, spaceship, and astronaut.