Symfony Station Communiqué — 17 January 2025 — A look at Symfony, Drupal, PHP, and other programming news!

This communiqué originally appeared on Symfony Station.

Welcome to this week's Symfony Station communiqué. It's your review of the essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities focusing on protecting democracy.

There's good content in all of our categories, so please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you. Drupal CMS was released this week. So, as you can imagine there is a ship ton of articles covering it.

This is why we publish on Fridays. So you can savor it over your weekend.

Or jump straight to your favorite section via our website.

Once again, thanks go out to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our communiqué in their Week of Symfony.

My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros.

Symfony

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> This week, Symfony development activity was very intense. The upcoming Symfony 7.3 version added a Slug constraint, introduced support for union types in OptionsResolver, enabled using HTTP/3 with the CurlHttpClient, and added support for invokable commands and input attributes. In addition, we published a summary of the Symfony project activity in 2024.

A Week of Symfony #941 (6-12 January 2025)

They also have:

Announcing the Symfony UX Core Team

Great news!

Featured Item

The best news in a long time came out with two announcements this week.

First in, The people should own the town square, Mastodon announced:

We are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

Meanwhile, Free our Feeds announced:

It will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.

Meanwhile the Social Web Foundation said:

The Social Web Foundation focuses on the network of platforms connected via ActivityPub. We also support efforts to make other distributed social networking protocols more open and equitable. For this reason, we are excited to support the FreeOurFeeds campaign launching today. This campaign is an opportunity to develop the capacity needed for the open social web protocols – ActivityPub along with Bluesky’s AT Protocol – to better interoperate, leveraging the entire open social ecosystem to create a working demonstration of algorithmic pluralism at scale.

Open Future summarized:

Both initiatives aim at the same problem: Ensuring that the underlying infrastructures powering social media services are run as public services that are resistant to capture from companies or individuals. They represent attempts to safeguard nascent public digital infrastructures for a new generation of social media services.

So while the Free our Feeds include some suspect AI cheerleaders and the SWF is too Meta tolerant for my tastes, I hope some fantastic things can come from these developments.