𝕭𝖆𝖘𝖘𝖕𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖑 🎬

gotwebd is the web interface for browsing Git repositories provided as part of Game of Trees-a project grown out of the OpenBSD community whose goal is to develop a new version control system that relies on prior art, takes what makes Git's design great, leaves out the parts that make Git hard for us to use, and invents new parts for an end result that serves our needs.

Other than the most obvious features, such as browsing repositories, reading commit logs, and inspecting diffs, gotwebd has a few unique features.

First, the privsep design and the use of sandboxing techniques on different operating systems; then the built-in SSH "web" authentication for access control, which also serves as protection against relentless AI scraping; and finally, the ability to directly serve static web content from a Git repository without the need for CI or external hosting.

In this talk, we'll walk through the design of gotwebd, its evolution over time, and present its unique features in detail.

speakers: 'Stefan Sperling

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/K7YXFT-gotweb/'

Yjs is one of the oldest and most widely used libraries that enhance web editors by allowing multiple users collaborate over documents in real time, also without requiring continuous network connection. Evernote and Jupyter Notebooks are among many of its prominent users.

During this presentation we'll address some of the common pitfalls that new developers may encounter when working with Yjs library, what architectural foundations are causing them to happen and what can we do to overcome them.

speakers: 'Bartosz Sypytkowski'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/ZYLKMM-optimising-yjs/'

At FOSDEM 2018, we introduced Package-URL (PURL: https://github.com/package-url/purl-spec), a "mostly" universal URL to identify and locate software packages: https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/purl/

Now, PURL is an international standard to accurately and consistently reference packages across ecosystems, regardless of whether you're working with language-specific managers, OS distributions, or containerized environments.

This talk highlights the journey of PURL, from its first presentation to Ecma standard and planned ISO standard. We'll share how PURLs enable accurate package tracking across ecosystems for vulnerability management (PURL is now part of CVE format), tool interoperability (already adopted by security tools, SCA platforms, and package registries), and compliance and security workflows (generating accurate and actionable SBOMs and VEXs).

Whether you maintain a package manager, build supply chain security tools, query packages or vulnerability databases, or just want better visibility into your polyglot dependencies, you'll learn how this lightweight standard is the essential infrastructure for modern software ecosystems.

speakers: 'Philippe Ombredanne'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/P8AAT3-purl/'

Miru is a set of web-based tools for media editing. In this talk, I'll present the video editing features that we're developing, and our journey to intuitive collaboration with offline support using CRDTs. I'll outline some similarities and differences between a video editing timeline and a rich text document, the CRDT libraries we evaluated, and what approaches did and didn't work for our editor.

speakers: 'Taye Adeyemi'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/K73PG3-miru-collaborative-video-editor/'

We implemented a prototype that enables real-time collaborative editing in Writer.

This prototype takes the form of a special read-only mode that allows inserting, deleting, and editing comments by way of the y-crdt/yrs CRDT library.

speakers: 'Michael Stahl'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/B73VPR-writer-comments-crdts-prototype/'

PouchDB and CouchDB have been an absolute Local-First Dream Team since 2013. In this workshop, we'll show you why. Join us for hands-on time with PouchDB itself, a look at a fleshed out demo app to see how the Open Source projects PouchDB, CouchDB and app state fit together, and a quick glance at a convenient Open-Source way to easily host your own CouchDB.

We'll cover:

We'll also share a bit about why we believe it is important to build on Open Source projects with a clear governance structure, so you can rely on it for the long-term.

Time permitting, we'll share some of the extraordinary projects we have built with PouchDB & CouchDB:

speakers: 'Alex Feyerke'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SDHGJY-local-first-meet-pouchdb-couchdb/'

We introduce Peergos, a peer-to-peer protocol for end-to-end encrypted storage, social networking, and application hosting built on top of libp2p. Peergos combines cryptographic identity, content addressing, and decentralized access control into a unified protocol where users fully control their data, identity, and applications without relying on trusted servers.

Instead of treating encryption as an add-on, Peergos integrates cryptographic capabilities directly into its data model: files, directories, social data, and application state are all encrypted and access-controlled by default. We will explain the design of Peergos' capability-based access control, how key rotation and sharing work in practice, and how identity portability is achieved without central authorities.

We will also introduce the Peergos application sandbox, which allows untrusted applications to operate over private user data without exposing plaintext or keys. This enables privacy-preserving apps such as social feeds, collaborative editing, and backups to run directly on encrypted storage.

The talk will include live demos and a discussion of performance trade-offs, limitations, and open problems in decentralized encrypted systems, including search, discovery, and offline access.

More info: https://peergos.org

https://book.peergos.org

https://github.com/peergos/peergos

speakers: 'Ian Preston'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/WXN9KF-peergos-e2ee-web/'

This talk is a call-to-action to join our campaign to convince the European Union that, in order to secure its digital future, it should invest in open source maintenance via an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF).

Right now, the EU is negotiating its multi-year budget for the period of 2028-2034. Traditionally, the EU budget has been focused on regional development and agriculture, but more and more policymakers are realizing that investment in our digital infrastructure is just as important as maintaining physical roads and bridges. Last year at FOSDEM, we discussed with you what an EU fund for open source maintenance should look like. A lot has happened since then: We have conducted an in-depth study into the political, legal and economic feasibility of an EU-STF, building on the successful example of the German Sovereign Tech Agency. We assembled a coalition of supporters from industry and civil society, and we have presented our proposal to the European Parliament and Member States.

Now it's time to take the campaign to the next level and we need your support to make it happen. The goal of this session is to present the findings of the feasibility study for the EU-STF and demonstrate why mission-driven investment, coordinated by the public sector, is important for the diversification of Europe's funding landscape. It will demonstrate concretely how such a proposal can directly improve the sustainability and health of the open source community globally, and why this is so important for Europe in achieving its digital future.

speakers: 'Nicholas Gates

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/KES3TH-funding_europes_open_digital_infrastructure_a_detailed_case_for_an_eu_sovereign_/'

OCapN (Object Capability Network) is a secure messaging protocol designed for the next generation of distributed applications. It leverages the capability security model (if you don't have it, you can't use it) to provide secure, peer-to-peer functionality with ergonomics that resemble ordinary programming. It has a rich set of features including promise pipelining, network transport agnosticism, error handling across networks, distributed acyclic garbage collection, and third-party handoffs providing powerful ways to share references with any peer. This talk will provide a tour of the protocol and show how it makes distributed, peer-to-peer development easier.

speakers: 'Jessica Tallon'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QPUXCQ-ocapn_the_secure_decentralized_protocol_of_the_future/'

In recent decades, the internet has increasingly become centralized, shifting from its hacker-driven origins into a cartel of advertising companies. It won't get better if we allow these same companies to drive the design of the web browsers and their protocols.

Within hacker communities, many solutions have been developed to mitigate centralization, but their adoption has been limited, often because they require specialized expertise to be operated safely.

In this talk I'll introduce you to a new open-source project that aims to provide an accessible alternative by building a web browser that is able to fetch web content using the BitTorrent protocol in tandem with the Tor network.

We will dive into the ethical, security, and privacy trade-offs at play when designing such an alternative web.

The IvI Project: https://ivi.eco

Historically, peer-to-peer communication has been at the heart of the internet since its early days, reaching its peak in the late 90s when the web truly became a platform for sharing knowledge and art. For a moment it felt like we could exchange freely with anyone else. Unfortunately, that did not last long: legal restrictions, centralization and the emergence of commercial streaming services did eventually reshape the internet.

But the peer-to-peer spirit did not die. Over times many tools have been developed to try to keep the web decentralized and open. They are all contributing to forge a vision in which the internet network must be owned and operated by its users.

The project "IvI" that I'm introducing to you tries to bring those pieces together in a way that makes it accessible to anyone: a web browser that streams web content using BitTorrent while guarding privacy using the Tor network. It allows people in different parts of the world to help each other access content freely, even when local internet providers or policies impose restrictions on torrenting.

Rebuilding the web using this model allow us to mitigate the risks of mass surveillance and censorship by design. Though seeding activity is public, the decentralized nature of the network makes it difficult to trace who is accessing what, or from where. It also builds solidarity into the web itself: users helping users across borders through open technology... but it does also raise complex ethical questions.

When users set up their "Akoopa" browser, they will have the choice to operate under a public or private (cloaked) profile.

By choosing a public profile, the node will communicate with the BitTorrent mainline DHT, it participates as an active node in traditional BitTorrent swarms. But here's the twist: a public node also exposes itself using an onion service which is only advertised to peers running the IvI stack. On the other hand, all the HTTP browsing traffic goes through Tor, effectively preventing websites (or their advertisers) from correlating the torrenting activity.

Alternatively, by choosing a private profile, all communications will go through Tor. This means that the node can not directly communicate with BitTorrent mainline DHT. Instead, it relies on the overlay network of public IvI nodes to proxy its requests. In such situation it can participate only passively with the traditional BitTorrent nodes, but it is actively supported by the other IvI nodes in the swarm.

With this design in mind, and a carefully hardened BitTorrent client implementation which is respectful of Tor bandwidth and exit policies, we should be able to work around the issues traditionally encountered when torrenting with Tor.

This initiative is not commercial, not governmental; it is just a community effort to reclaim the web's original spirit. It's a simple idea that poses this question: What if we delivered the web itself through torrents? The technology exists; now it's about putting it together and doing so collectively to figure out how to make it work for everyone.

speakers: 'Jah Kosha'

link: 'https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EBMAJA-surfing-on-torrents/'