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  "description": "\n\n\n\nWelcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.\n\n\n\nIt'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.\n\n\nIMHO, the best way to do that is to use tools from the Techno Anarchist Manifesto to build your own site(s) to participate i",
  "path": "/the-programmers-fulcrum-27-february-2026/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-27T13:30:39.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.thefulcrum.dev",
  "tags": [
    "Techno Anarchist Manifesto",
    "Open Media Network",
    "Stochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI",
    "Good vibes, bad vendors",
    "The tension that’s pushed back into the Fediverse the last few years",
    "A Minimal, Governable Infrastructure for Trust-Based Media Flows",
    "Why “magic links” and passcodes are taking over news logins",
    "Mike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…",
    "FAIR, WordPress, and Knowing When to Stop",
    "What’s new in Gutenberg 22.6?",
    "Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship",
    "WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 Ships After Delay as Project Leadership Realigns Release Around AI and Milestone Story",
    "WP Accessibility Day Is Crowdfunding a Booth at WordCamp Europe to Close the EAA Knowledge Gap",
    "How to add custom entries to the editor Preview dropdown",
    "Introduction to the Block Bindings API",
    "Block Hooks API",
    "Architecting Reliable Remote Requests with the HTTP API",
    "Why I Chose Ghost (And Why I Keep Choosing It)",
    "Open Source in the age of AI",
    "A Gourmet for the People",
    "canvas 1.2.0",
    "February 2026 Organic Maps update",
    "Adding OpenStreetMap login to Auth0",
    "Keep Android Open",
    "Tor VPN Beta",
    "Open means open. Or it means nothing.",
    "Firefox 148 Is Now Available for Download with AI Kill Switch and Other Changes",
    "6.6.9 - Security and stability improvements",
    "New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.7",
    "Nextcloud",
    "LibreOffice Online: a fresh start",
    "Interview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer",
    "Creativity as resistance",
    "Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 7.0 Release Candidate",
    "Please welcome /e/OS 3.5!",
    "Meet Murena Maps",
    "Sailfish OS na Sony Xperia 10 III: seznámení a instalace",
    "Raw Therapy",
    "Internet Protocols, Power, and the Rebirth of the Border",
    "The unbearable weight of cruft",
    "Acting ethically in an imperfect world",
    "here's how to use AI",
    "The Automated Librarian: A Drupal 11 Data Discovery",
    "The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.",
    "The AI scraper problem and a possible fix",
    "Are markdown files becoming the new dot files?",
    "A Look At HTMX With PHP",
    "Loading Smarter: SVG vs. Raster Loaders in Modern Web Design",
    "Making a Responsive Pyramidal Grid With Modern CSS",
    "Turning a CSS Carousel into a Theme Switcher",
    "A Complete Guide to Bookmarklets",
    "uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist",
    "Turn Dependabot Off",
    "Internal documentation | Best practices and how to build it with XWiki",
    "Platform 6",
    "Federated End-to-End Encrypted Messaging is Coming Soon",
    "Creating your own federated microblog",
    "Robot.Villas",
    "v1.15.0",
    "Ruby on Whales: Dockerizing Ruby and Rails development",
    "Global tags and content discovery",
    "rdf-pub - generic Activity-Pub Server",
    "Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop submissions summary",
    "FR154 – Search and Community",
    "The results are in: the community wants HolosDiscover back",
    "Holos 1.0.0-rc-3 has been published.",
    "One year on PixelFed: Reclaiming my Photography on the Algoritm",
    "v4.5.7",
    "Everyone is a publisher!",
    "Version 0.21.0 of #GoToSocial, aka Sacrilegious Sloth, has emerged from the release candidate process",
    "Console based XMPP client, Profanity version 0.16.0, has just been released",
    "Gajim 2.4.4",
    "Signal Protocol for a P2P Webapp",
    "Practical Decentralization",
    "Be Wary of Bluesky",
    "AHOY! 2025 - Samuel Newman with How we added video to Bluesky",
    "We’re building up the Democratic Tech Fund.",
    "We're creating cooperative alternatives to surveillance capitalism and tech monopolies.",
    "Custom click tracking domains",
    "Thunderbird 148 Email Client Improves Accessibility in Various Tree Views",
    "Email on your terms with Schedule Send in Tuta Mail!",
    "on Flipboard",
    "@thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev",
    "The Techno Anarchist Manifesto",
    "Share on Open Social Media"
  ],
  "textContent": "Welcome to this week's The Programmer's Fulcrum.\n\nIt'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.\n\nIMHO, 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.\n\nThe second best strategy is to have accounts on the Fediverse and use the hell out of them.\n\nWe publish TPF on Fridays so you can enjoy it over your weekend.\n\nThere'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.\n\nOr you can jump straight to your favorite section.\n\n  * Website CMSs\n  * Tools\n  * Programming\n  * ActivityPub\n  * Fediverse\n  * More\n\n\n\n\n**FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And may involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ´em.**\n\n### Follow us on the Fediverse\n\n* * *\n\n## Featured Item(s)\n\nThere were two great articles this week and I will quote extensively from both.\n\n**TechPolicy Press** writes:\n\nAI technology is advancing. Anyone thinking critically about large language models and their impact on society now faces a more complex challenge: the agentic turn.\n\nWe 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.\n\nWhat 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.\n\nStochastic Flocks and the Critical Problem of 'Useful' AI\n\nBen Werdmuller explains why AI coding can now be useful:\n\nGood vibes, bad vendors\n\n**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.**\n\n**Hamish Campbell** writes:\n\nScale 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.\n\nBut 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.\n\nNLnet 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.\n\nSo 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nGrassroots actors often see decisions emerging without any transparent process, norms solidifying without any affective debate and institutions appearing to “take over”.\n\nWhere 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.\n\nThe tension that’s pushed back into the Fediverse the last few years\n\n**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.**\n\n**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.**\n\n**And build bridges to CMSs, email, RSS, Non-Bluesky ATProto, Matrix, P2P, Solid Pods, etc. etc. as well.**\n\n**In other words build useful tools not platforms or even protocols.**\n\nOMN shares a vision of how this can work:\n\nA Minimal, Governable Infrastructure for Trust-Based Media Flows\n\n\n\n\n* * *\n\n\n\n\n## Open Media Network Site CMSs\n\n\n\n\nNiemanLab reports:\n\nWhy “magic links” and passcodes are taking over news logins\n\n### WordPress\n\nNetribution shares:\n\nMike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…\n\nJoost de Valk has:\n\nFAIR, WordPress, and Knowing When to Stop\n\n**Well, fuck. At least TYPO3 has taken it over.**\n\nMake WordPress examines:\n\nWhat’s new in Gutenberg 22.6?\n\n**SVG icons! 🤸🏾‍♂️**\n\nWordPress Europe wants applications for the:\n\nKim Parsell Memorial Scholarship\n\n**Hey WP Europe, get on the Fediverse. You literally have an official ActivityPub plugin for fucks sake.**\n\nThe Repository reports:\n\nWordPress 7.0 Beta 1 Ships After Delay as Project Leadership Realigns Release Around AI and Milestone Story\n\nWP Accessibility Day Is Crowdfunding a Booth at WordCamp Europe to Close the EAA Knowledge Gap\n\nWordPress Developer shows us:\n\nHow to add custom entries to the editor Preview dropdown\n\nCarolina Nymark provides two new lessions:\n\nIntroduction to the Block Bindings API\n\nBlock Hooks API\n\nDelicousBrains looks at:\n\nArchitecting Reliable Remote Requests with the HTTP API\n\n### Ghost\n\nG. Casqueiro shares:\n\nWhy I Chose Ghost (And Why I Keep Choosing It)\n\nJohn Odolon explores:\n\nOpen Source in the age of AI\n\nGrassroots Economic Organizing\n\nA Gourmet for the People\n\n### Drupal CMS\n\nDrupal releases:\n\ncanvas 1.2.0\n\n\nBack to top 👆🏼\n\n\n* * *\n\n\n\n\n##  Techno Anarchist / OMN Tools\n\n\n\n\nOrganic Maps shares its:\n\nFebruary 2026 Organic Maps update\n\nTerence Eden examines:\n\nAdding OpenStreetMap login to Auth0\n\nF-Droid has:\n\nKeep Android Open\n\nTor VPN Beta\n\nJannis Fedoruk-Betschki says:\n\nOpen means open. Or it means nothing.\n\n### Browsers\n\n9to5Linux reports:\n\nFirefox 148 Is Now Available for Download with AI Kill Switch and Other Changes\n\n**My VPN is Mozilla and I use Firebird, but you should use Zen, Waterfox, or LibreWolf as your browser.**\n\nSpeaking of, Waterfox announces:\n\n6.6.9 - Security and stability improvements\n\nOr go hardcore with Tor:\n\nNew Release: Tor Browser 15.0.7\n\n### Cloud\n\nFOSS, Privacy en minder Big Tech looks at:\n\nNextcloud\n\n### Writing\n\nLibreOffice announces:\n\nLibreOffice Online: a fresh start\n\n### Creative\n\nGIMP has an:\n\nInterview with Øyvind Kolås, GIMP developer\n\nThe Creative Independent shares:\n\nCreativity as resistance\n\n**They have an interesting site design.**\n\n### Linux\n\n9to5 Linux reports:\n\nLinus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 7.0 Release Candidate\n\nMurena has:\n\nPlease welcome /e/OS 3.5!\n\nMeet Murena Maps\n\nRoot looks at:\n\nSailfish OS na Sony Xperia 10 III: seznámení a instalace\n\n### This week's featured OMN tool\n\n#### Raw Therapy\n\nRawTherapee is a free, cross-platform raw image processing program.\n\nRaw Therapy\n\n\nBack to top 👆🏼\n\n\n* * *\n\n\n\n\n## OMN Programming\n\n\n\n\nTech Policy Press explores:\n\nInternet Protocols, Power, and the Rebirth of the Border\n\n**This is why P2P bridging and interoperability are critical.**\n\nJoan Westenberg has:\n\nThe unbearable weight of cruft\n\n**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.**\n\nSmashing Frames shares:\n\nActing ethically in an imperfect world\n\nThis caused quite a discussion.\n\n**My comment is a question. If a certain tech**\n\n  * **was made by shits via shitty behavior,**\n  * **and 95% of the use it is put to is shit,**\n  * **and those uses are shit for the planet, humanity, and democracy,**\n  * **and if 85% of the people using it are shits,**\n\n\n\n**is it a shitty tech only shitty people would use?**\n\n**Hmmm, anyway IMHOhere's how to use AI if you have to (which usually you shouldn't).**\n\nDrupal Odyssey has this series:\n\nThe Automated Librarian: A Drupal 11 Data Discovery\n\n**This is a proper use case for AI that is executed properly.**\n\n### Markdown\n\nJoan Westenberg says:\n\nThe pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.\n\nDavid Duymelinck has:\n\nThe AI scraper problem and a possible fix\n\nAre markdown files becoming the new dot files?\n\n**If you don't use AI coding you don't have these problems.**\n\n### HTMX\n\nHashBangCode refreshes:\n\nA Look At HTMX With PHP\n\n### CSS\n\nCSS Tricks has:\n\nLoading Smarter: SVG vs. Raster Loaders in Modern Web Design\n\nMaking a Responsive Pyramidal Grid With Modern CSS\n\n**Overly complicated but interesting.**\n\nDear Schepp explores:\n\nTurning a CSS Carousel into a Theme Switcher\n\n**Ditto.**\n\n### JavaScript\n\nCSS Tricks shares:\n\nA Complete Guide to Bookmarklets\n\n**This is the type of tool JavaScript should be used for.**\n\n### AI\n\nLay Lavish shares:\n\nuBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist\n\n### Other\n\nFilippo Valsorda says:\n\nTurn Dependabot Off\n\n**Fair enough, but I recommend turning off GitHub period and using Forgejo or migrating to Codeberg.**\n\nXWiki has new:\n\nInternal documentation | Best practices and how to build it with XWiki\n\n### _This week's featured programming tool_\n\n#### Platform 6\n\nPlatform 6 brings people and organisations together to design and build a co-operative future.\n\nPlatform 6\n\n\nBack to top 👆🏼\n\n\n* * *\n\n\n\n\n## ActivityPub\n\n\n\n\nBig news from We Distribute:\n\nFederated End-to-End Encrypted Messaging is Coming Soon\n\n**Thrilled to see Bonfire working with Emissary on this effort.**\n\nFedify examines:\n\nCreating your own federated microblog\n\nThis is an interesting little project:\n\nRobot.Villas\n\nCastopod releases:\n\nv1.15.0\n\nEvilMartians look at:\n\nRuby on Whales: Dockerizing Ruby and Rails development\n\n**Hey Evils, since Mastodon is written with Ruby why don't you set up an instance.**\n\nActivityPub.space explores:\n\nGlobal tags and content discovery\n\n### _This week's featured ActivityPub featured tool_\n\nI ran across this one this week.\n\nrdf-pub - generic Activity-Pub Server\n\n**It's a possible solution to the JSON vs JSON-LD debate.**\n\n\nBack to top 👆🏼\n\n\n* * *\n\n\n\n\n## Fediverse\n\n\n\n\nFediForum aggregrates:\n\nGrowing the Open Social Web un-workshop submissions summary\n\nConnected Places shares:\n\nFR154 – Search and Community\n\nFediLab announces:\n\nThe results are in: the community wants HolosDiscover back\n\nHolos Social announces:\n\nHolos 1.0.0-rc-3 has been published.\n\nFrame Travel Roam Capture has:\n\nOne year on PixelFed: Reclaiming my Photography on the Algoritm\n\nMastodon announces:\n\nv4.5.7\n\nMatthias Scharwies explores less well known Fediverse platforms:\n\nEveryone is a publisher!\n\nGoToSocial announces:\n\nVersion 0.21.0 of #GoToSocial, aka Sacrilegious Sloth, has emerged from the release candidate process\n\n\nBack to top 👆🏼\n\n\n* * *\n\n\n\n\n## More\n\n\n\n\nGonzalo Nemmi reports:\n\nConsole based XMPP client, Profanity version 0.16.0, has just been released\n\nGajim announces:\n\nGajim 2.4.4\n\n### P2P\n\nZoron reannounces:\n\nSignal Protocol for a P2P Webapp\n\n### Other Slightly Federated Social Media\n\nPaul Frazee looks at:\n\nPractical Decentralization\n\nKevin Åberg Kultalahti says:\n\nBe Wary of Bluesky\n\n**Yep.**\n\nATProto Community has:\n\nAHOY! 2025 - Samuel Newman with How we added video to Bluesky\n\n### Democracy Tech\n\nThe Free Knowledge Institute announces:\n\nWe’re building up the Democratic Tech Fund.\n\nWe're creating cooperative alternatives to surveillance capitalism and tech monopolies.\n\n**Please make a donation at the open collective link above. I just set up a recurring monthly one.**\n\n### eMail / Newsletters\n\nButtondown introduces:\n\nCustom click tracking domains\n\n9to5 Linux reports:\n\nThunderbird 148 Email Client Improves Accessibility in Various Tree Views\n\nTuta announces:\n\nEmail on your terms with Schedule Send in Tuta Mail!\n\n\n\n\n* * *\n\n## Sign up for The Fulcrum\n\nDevelopers defending democracy! We cover items and ideas in Battalion's Techno Anarchist Manifesto that relate to development.\n\nSubscribe\n\nEmail sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.\n\nNo spam. Unsubscribe anytime.\n\n## CTAs\n\n  * That’s it for this week. Please share The Programmer's Fulcrum.\n  * Follow us on Flipboard or at @thefulcrum@thefulcrum.dev on the Fediverse for daily coverage.\n  * Read, live, and share The Techno Anarchist Manifesto!\n\n\n\n\n**And please build something for a community!**\n\n\n\n\nShare on Open Social Media\n\n\n",
  "title": "The Programmer's Fulcrum: 27 February, 2026",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-27T13:30:39.000Z"
}