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](notiz.blog/2026/09/23/blogroll…

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

toot.io

2026-09-20 22:21:47

🦣 Herds that roam apart still come down to the same waterhole to keep watch together.

Introducing Waterhole: an open-source collaborative moderation tool built specifically for Mastodon instances that manually review and approve signups.

As Fediverse communities grow or spam waves hit, registration queues can quickly become overwhelming. Waterhole gives your moderation team a shared, real-time workspace to review applicants efficiently without compromising server autonomy or applicant privacy.

✨ Key Features:
• 📋 Shared Queues: Pending registration requests mirror directly into Waterhole. Claim requests, filter them by risk, and coordinate review status in real time.
• 💬 Team Discussion: Leave internal notes and discuss applicants collaboratively before deciding.
• 🔍 Proactive Signals: Automated checks highlight known throwaway email providers, datacenter IPs, Tor exits, templated join reasons, and burst signup patterns.
• 🛡️ Collective Defense: Opt-in cross-instance alerts notify you when the same spammer or bot pattern is prowling around multiple herds. Sharing only behavioral tracks and signals, never private applicant details.
• 🔒 Full Server Autonomy: Approvals and rejections are dispatched directly back to your instance via your Mastodon Admin API. No automated bans or AI decisions. You always keep complete control over who joins your community.

Waterhole is 100% free software under AGPLv3.

🔗 Connect your Mastodon instance to our Waterhole:
waterhole.toot.io/about

💻 Explore the source code, documentation, contribute, or self-host:
github.com/tootio/waterhole

#Mastodon #Fediverse #FediverseAdmin #MastoAdmin #OpenSource #SelfHosted #Privacy

GitHub - tootio/waterhole: Collaborative moderation for Mastodon registration requests.

Collaborative moderation for Mastodon registration requests. - tootio/waterhole

^GitHub

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

Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-16 11:34:28

How to get a DOI for your blog posts

shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/how-t…
Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path.

Background

A few years ago, I documented how to to get an International Standard Serial Number for a blog. An ISSN uniquely identifies a publication, which makes it easier for scholars and researchers to reference it. Getting one depends a little on whether a national institution is willing to accept your application.

Similarly, I also got an ORCiD which is used to uniquely identify researchers. That means it is possible to disambiguate "Einstein, A" the eminent physicist from "Einstein, A" a lovely chap called Allen who researches invasive slugs in Paraguay.

My blog posts are regularly referenced in academic papers, books, conferences, and news articles. The way most scholars cite a work is using a Digital Object Identifier. The idea is that a DOI is a unique and persistent code which can be used to refer to a specific article. If I ever stop using shkspr.mobi as my domain, or re-order my website, the DOI can be redirected to the article's new home. Future scholars will be able to follow a reference more easily than hoping https://example.com/article123 still exists.

Getting a DOI the easy way

If you're an academic, your institution will have a paid subscription to a service which will "mint" a new DOI for all your articles.

If not, you can upload your paper to a service like arXiv and they'll mint a DOI for you. That's how I got a DOI for my MSc.

What about people who aren't traditional academics or who want to keep their content on their own website? There are a variety of paid-for services, some of which charge an eye-watering amount of money to create a DOI for you.

Or, there's Rogue Scholar.

Let's Go Rogue!

So what is Rogue-Scholar.org?

Rogue Scholar is an open access archive and registry for science blogs. It preserves science blog posts, makes them citable via DOI, and ensures their long-term discoverability alongside formal scholarly literature.

Nifty! My blog just about sneaks in to their "Computer Science" category. They require you to have a full-text feed of your posts. You also need to licence your content to them as Creative Commons Attribution.

Applying wasn't too difficult. I filled in their form, then jumped into their Slack. We had a bit of a discussion about what I needed to change in order to be approved.

A few days later, I was live at rogue-scholar.org/communities/…

Which means, if you visit doi.org/10.59350/395ha-fss97 you'll be redirected to one of my blog posts.

Automatic Submission of New Content

Rogue Scholar automatically polls my feed, ingests my content, and then mints a DOI for every new post they encounter. There's nothing manual I have to do.

That's all very well for new content. But I have posts on here going way back to 1986. How can they get discovered and DOI'd?

Manual Submission of Old Content

By default, Rogue Scholar ingested the 40 most recent posts from my blog. Actually, that's not quite accurate. It got the 40 most recently updated posts. As I'd recently edited a few older posts, they got themselves a DOI.

I don't know how often Rogue Scholar polls my blog's feed. In my experiments, adding a new post resulted in a DOI being issued a couple of minutes after publication.

At the moment, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add older content. I'm working on a WordPress plugin to retroactively add DOIs and make them discoverable.

Getting the DOI

The Rogue Scholar API is based on InvenioDRM.

Retrieving the DOI via their API requires you to make an unauthenticated request to:

https://rogue-scholar.org/api/records?q=metadata.identifiers.identifier%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fwhatever%22

That's your URl, wrapped in quotes, and the whole thing URl encoded. Visit this example. You can also use your post's GUID.

That gets back a rather detailed JSON document. The DOI is noted in several locations, but is easiest to find in hits→hits→0→links→doi

It's important to note that Rogue Scholar generates two DOIs for your post. One for the post, another for the specific version of the post. If you update a post, it should get a new DOI. That way someone can refer to the post where you said your favourite band was the Spice Girls and not the edited one where you changed it to say B*Witched.

Alternatively, you can use the CrossRef search if you want to look at HTML results. See this CrossRef example.

As an aside, once you have the DOI, it's possible to create a short DOI at shortdoi.org/ - I'll be honest, I've never seen these in the wild and they are not recommended for use. Nevertheless, the API is pretty simple - shortdoi.org/10.59350/395ha-fs… will return a shorter URl like doi.org/rnjj

Finally, there's a "vanity" DOI for the entire blog. In my case 10.59350/shkspr.

Generating your own DOI

Your blog posts can self-attest a DOI - when Rogue Scholar sees that in your Atom feed, it will register it on your behalf.

The code for generating a valid DOI is relatively straightforward.

• Generate a random number between 0 and 1,099,511,627,775.
• Convert it to a Base 32 string.
• Add a two character checksum to the end.
• Prefix it with 10.59350/

Your new DOI can be made discoverable in your Atom feed by adding this to a post:
XML<id>doi.org/10.59350/12345-67890&l…

Shortly after publication, it will be "minted" and be linkable.

Making the DOI discoverable in HTML

How do you semantically add a DOI to your HTML's metadata? By far the most popular citation manager is Zotero. They maintain a page describing the metadata they look for. According to them, this needs to be in your page's <head>:
HTML<meta name=citation_doi content=10..../...>

They don't say whether it requires the https://doi.org/ prefix - but looking at Mendeley and AltMetric, it appears not.

To use DublinCore, the AltMetric recommended syntax is:
HTML<meta name=DC.Identifier content=doi:10..../...>

Within the HTML, there's no specific Microdata syntax, but Schema.org recommends the sameAs property. Something like:
HTML<a itemprop="sameAs" href="https://doi.org/10.../...">10.../...</a>

Downsides

OK, it isn't all flowers and kittens. There are a few things you ought to know before proceeding down this path.

Loss of Control

For the IndieWeb / ReDeCentralise / Self-Hosing crowd, it's important to realise that DOI is a somewhat centralised services. Yes, lots of different orgs can mint a DOI, but as each ID has to be globally unique, doi.org sits in the middle as a benevolent gatekeeper. If DOI.org went bust or became evil, all the https://doi.org/10.... links would die. There are many other services like DataCite and CrossRef which can resolve a DOI - but it might turn out to be a bit fragile.

Similarly, if Rogue Scholar ever goes properly rogue then they can redirect my DOI to wherever they like. That level of control is useful if my site disappears; they can redirect to an archive. But if they get hacked, it could redirect somewhere unsavoury.

Having my site's content backed-up somewhere is useful but, again, without control or verification I worry that I might not be able to effectively manage it.

I use CSS to control the layout of my work but once it is archived as plain HTML or PDF, that formatting can disappear.

I don't know what will happen if I ever change DOI issuer.

Tracking Citations

I have a Google Scholar alert set up for my domain shkspr.mobi. That picks up people who make reference to this site. Hurrah! But, if they use https://doi.org/10.... rather than https://shkspr.mobi/... I won't get alerted.

Luckily, Rogue Scholar offer Citation Tracking which should autopopulate their API with any backlinks from other sources. I'm yet to discover how that works in practice. I don't think it will give me an email alert though.

On a vanity issue, the DOI metadata shows the publisher of my posts as Rogue Scholar's parent organisation - Front Matter.

If you look at the API response from api.crossref.org/works/10.5935… you'll see something like:
JSON{
"message": {
"institution": [
{
"name": "Front Matter"
}
],
"group-title": "Terence Eden's Blog",
"publisher": "Front Matter",
"DOI": "10.59350/5ck9b-kjv69",
"author": [
{
"ORCID": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069",
"given": "Terence",
"family": "Eden"
}
]
}}
Some citation managers will show the publication name as "Terence Eden's Blog" - others as "Front Matter".

Licencing

Rogue Scholar has a hard requirement that all content be Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). There's no ability (yet) to choose different licences. Personally, I prefer Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). I've allowed Rogue Scholar to use CC BY for my work which, of course, means if you get my posts through them you are also allowed to use CC BY.

If you get my work through my own website it is the slightly more restrictive CC BY-SA.

Does that make a practical difference? I don't know.

Verification

A DOI is persistent. That doesn't mean it is verifiable. If this blog ever goes offline the DOI will redirect to an archive - but there's no real way to tell that the text in that archive is accurate. There's no hashing or cryptographic signing. Yes, those things are rather brittle, but I think it would be helpful for the long-term integrity of citation chains.

Excluding Content

Suppose there is content you don't want to receive a DOI, what do you do? You'll need to generate an RSS feed which excludes those specific posts.

For WordPress, you can do something like /feed/atom/?cat=-1234 to exclude posts which have a category with the ID of 1234.

There are some filters on the Rogue Scholar site which you might also be able to use.

Deleting Content

I don't think there's a way to delete or retract content from Rogue Scholar's DOI system yet. If you accidentally publish something you didn't mean to, it'll live on in the archives forever.

Affiliations

My ORCiD lists where I worked on certain dates. Initially, Rogue Scholar linked those to blog posts I wrote during my employment. However, all my posts were written in a personal capacity. It is possible to get those affiliations removed if they are inaccurate.

More Vanity

I initially tried generating DOIs like edent-00f47 - although it's a valid Base 32 string with a checksum, it carries semantic meaning (my name) so shouldn't really be used. Ah well! Back to random strings.

Humility

Is this a valid use of the DOI ecosystem? A surprising number of my posts have been referenced in academic papers - but surely not all of my posts are worthy of getting a DOI? The problem is, I don't know when a shitpost will hit the zeitgeist and become quoted in papers, books, and articles.

It feels a bit self-indulgent and a little pretentious to mint a new DOI for every previous and future post on this site. But it isn't like the DOI system is running out of space, is it?

Is it worth it?

For me? Yes.

I think it is important that scholarly blogs are properly referenced. True, not all of my posts are cutting-edge research - but I'm always surprised which ones end up in someone's thesis or become part of a set-text.

I'm excited to see if this leads to an increase or decrease in my blog's visibility in academia.

If you have strong feelings either way about DOIs and/or blogs, please drop a comment in the box.

You may cite this post using doi.org/10.59350/5ck9b-kjv69 😃
#academia #citation #DOI #HTML #WordPress

How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain

Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention.

^{Terence Eden (Terence Eden’s Blog)}

Falls jemand einen #Softwareentwickler braucht: Ich bin gerade auf der Suche nach einer neuen Stelle.

(Programmier-) sprachen: #TS, #JS, #Java, #Python sowie ein bisschen C++, PHP, CMD, C#, ...
und einiges an Erfahrung mir Shell/Bash/Batch Scrippting, (#GitHub-) Actions u.a., #Yaml, #Markdown, #RST, #JSON, ...
DB: NQL, SQL u.a. (meiste Erfahrung mit einer Eigenentwicklung der flexis und #PostgrSQL)
Bisherige Softwarebranche(n): #Webdevelopment, #Planungssoftware, #3D Darstellung, #Tools & #Scripting (#Arduino) u.a.

Ich hab vor allem Interesse(n) in den Bereichen: #Webentwicklung, IT-Security und allgemein der sinnvollen nachhaltigen #Softwareentwicklung (gerne auch im Bereich der Green IT) und sehr gerne mit #Linux.

Voraussichtlich werde ich demnächst fertig mit meiner #Ausbildung zum #Fachinformatiker für #Anwendungsentwicklung und wäre danach frei in der Entscheidung eine neue Stelle als Softwareentwickler / Software Engineer / Webentwickler oder ähnliches zu beginnen.

Also falls irgendeine Firma sucht, dann gerne mich erstmal hier kontaktieren und ich gebe euch dann meine Kontaktdaten.

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Kontaktiert mich bitte nicht, wenn ihr nur einen Entwickler oder Betreuer für Apple / Mac Geräte braucht. Dafür bin ich nicht qualifiziert.