Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, the Web, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 26, 2025

• [Old] Session ☛ Session Pro Beta Development Update: Progress and Community Insights

  Session Pro—a premium tier that unlocks advanced messaging features on Session—is on the horizon. This past month has seen substantial progress towards Session Pro Beta, the initial version of Session Pro designed to facilitate user testing and feedback. This update provides details on technical progress towards the release of Session Pro Beta, along with other developments behind the scenes to support more advanced future features for Session Pro. It also provides current estimates for the potential launch timeframe for Session Pro beta.

• Jasper Tandy ☛ I've been using fzf all wrong

  fzf is one of those pieces of software that I've had installed for years, but I don't really use it. I know how good it is, but I just absent-mindedly used it for something so useful that I think I accidentally just made something I find extremely tedious, incredibly trivial. I use ctrl-r a lot for searching history, but I never use the path completion feature. Until this morning when I, completely unthinking, did this: [...]

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Celebrating the contributors that power Mozilla Support

      Every day, Firefox users around the world turn to Mozilla Support (SUMO) with a question, a hiccup or just a little curiosity. It’s community-powered – contributors offer answers and support to make someone’s day a little easier.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Pete Brown ☛ Maybe it’s time to sunset the Hugo site.

    As it turns out, it was my crappy storage array that was causing the problem. I have three thumb drives plugged into a powered USB hub, and I’m running mergerfs on the Pi to combine those into a single logical drive. One of the thumb drives must have gotten jiggled a bit loose when I was moving the whole thing out of my office, causing the Pi’s boot process to fail. When I reseated the thumb drive, the Pi booted up properly and is now back in business.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Static Site Generators

    I enjoyed this post from Jan once I’d translated it from Dutch and could actually read it. He talks about the irony of how the output of a static site generator is so simple, yet they’re somehow difficult to set up and maintain.

    Since I’ve been around the block when it comes to blogging platforms, I have some thoughts on this.

• Education

  • FSF ☛ Hundreds of free software supporters tuned in for FSF40 hackathon

    So many contributions on six projects (FSD, GNU Boot, GNU Guix, Lewa, op-mattermost, and Org Mode) over one weekend is an achievement. The progress made this weekend is worthy of celebration itself, but at the end of the hackathon, we drew special attention to a three special contributions with an award: [...]

• Programming/Development

  • Rust

    • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Interview with Jan David Nose

      On the Content Team, we had our first whirlwind outing at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington, USA. There we had a chance to speak with folks about interesting things happening in the Project and the wider community.

• Standards/Consortia

  • ProcessOne ☛ Stop Telling Us XMPP Should Use JSON

    Does that make it the universal format for every protocol? Of course not.

    Consider this: browsers still use HTML to organize web pages, not JSON. Same with CSS. Why? Because using JSON for everything would be a nightmare.

    XML remains the best format for representing trees—deep hierarchies of nested data. JSON handles flatter structures well, but good messaging protocols are extensible: extensions can be embedded at different levels and composed together, like Lego bricks. That’s where XML shines.