You are all invited to our audio/video conferencing hangout.
Please leave a comment here or on Discord to add things to the agenda.
This topic will be updated after the call with notes.
About
FreeSewing’s bi-weekly hangout is an informal hangout/chat/meeting that is open to everyone.
The call is organized/hosted by @tangerineshark.
The call does not have a fixed structure or agenda items. Everyone is free to suggest agenda items, ask questions, or bring ideas.
Location
This week’s meeting will be entirely on Jitsi Meet.
We’re still trying out Jitsi to test its capabilities and to identify possible technical issues, in case we ever want or need a permanent Discord alternative.
Jitsi should work for everyone via web browser, no login required.
We will keep Discord as our backup, in case we encounter problems with Jitsi and need to switch platforms. (Keep watching the Discord #meeting-chat channel for possible updates.)
Link to the meeting: Jitsi Meet (no login required)
Date and Time
Date: Saturday, August 1st, 2026, 4pm UTC, which can be found in your local time zone here.
Or check the Events tab in Discord!
Meetings are always at 6pm, Antwerp time.
After our most recent call, I started looking into hosted Jitsi solutions since if we’re going to be changing away from Discord, there was the legitimate concern that merely changing to another US-based solution isn’t all that meaningful a change.
What I really wanted was a solution where people could just sign in with their FreeSewing user account, although we should also support guest accounts.
The way that can be implemented in Jitsi is a bit, awkward. But long story short in the end I felt it was better to just do what it takes so we can host our calls without having to compromise.
What does this mean?
There’s a new page that serves as an entrypoint onto our online meeting infrastructure
Strictly speaking, that page does not exist. It is implemented only on our new site which is a work-in-progress port away from Docusaurus and is available at https://preview.freesewing
The idea is that we can use the final URL starting today, and it will all ‘just work’
On that page, you can either join the call with your FreeSewing account (if you are logged in) or join as guest
For people who join with their FreeSewing account, their username and avatar will automatically be set
FreeSewing users with the role ‘admin’ as well as a hard-coded list (currently empty, but I should change that) will automatically receive the ‘moderator’ role
I’d like to make this the de-facto default for the upcoming calls, but I think it would be good if a few people tried it out first. Because while it works for me, it would be silly if it turns out it doesn’t work for others and it’s during the call that we realize that.
I experienced that known problem initially authenticating with the preview site. However, I don’t think I saw a welcome back false message? Instead, the symptoms I saw were:
Typing in password: I got an Authentication Failed error.
Having it send an email: I never received the email it told me it had sent.
Selecting “sign in as different user” and then re-entering my username and password fixed the issue.
The Jitsi Meet meeting experience on meet.freesewing.eu/hangout was pretty much idential to my experience last week on the meet.jit.si hosted instance.
I was the only one in the meeting, but I think that things were working okay, on a technical level.
I note that I was automatically made a moderator when I joined the meeting.
My name in the meeting was “Benjamin F.” which matches the username in my freesewing.eu account settings.
I tried the jitsi link last week and all seemed well (I was alone of course). But this link doesn’t let me in. I get the user ‘false’ message, get asked for a password and fail, but no possibility to change users at any step?
Could you please try accessing the https://preview.freesewing.eu site and logging out (Your Account > Sign Out), if you happen to be already signed in? Once you are logged out, please try signing in again: Sign In > Sign in as a different user.
(For some reason, the redirect from freesewing.eu/hangout seems to be no longer working for me. Instead, it causes an empty file named “Unknown” to be downloaded.)
Edit: Added: (The freesewing.eu/hangout redirect is now working for me again. I’m not sure why it was not working earlier.)
For the August 1 meeting tomorrow, we will not use the FreeSewing Jitsi Meet instance that is currently being tested. Instead, we will continue to use the meet.jit.si hosted instance as planned.
(However, I believe that for the meeting after that on August 15, we will switch to FreeSewing’s Jitsi Meet instance. By then, the login/redirect issues should either be resolved or we should have a better understanding of how to work around them.)
People still having minor problems here and there.
If people have problems logging in, they can join as guest.
Joost is working on setting up Zulip, a chat alternative to Discord.
Will be able to log in via FreeSewing.
But, is worried about Discord users feeling left out?
People are already checking Discord and the forum. Another 3rd place to check?
Want to provide a place for people to go, to cover people who might not want to use Discord.
Hope to add integration for pull request notifications and other backend development discussions to this chat. So, different audiences for Zulip and Discord.
Alternatives rejected:
Mattermost no longer can be easily used for free.
Perception of too much churn with Matrix development.
Can’t have SSO functionality with Zulip in their free version? We will look out for this.
Everyone please look at the preview.freesewing.eu site and test it out.
It will be the main FreeSewing site.
We want to release it in August, in time for FreeSewing’s anniversary.
Uses Vite, instead of Docusaurus.
Should be faster and also easier to run locally.
The freesewing.eu/stats page isn’t working.
How can we help new users?
From Discord discussion.
There are limits to the amount of help we can provide absolute beginner sewists.
Video tutorials for how to make FreeSewing garments. We could make more.
Wouter: Working on a Titan derivative with darts.
Wanted to recreate Xander which was originally based on Charlie.
Create a trousers block with darts as an intermediate step.
Would like to have as many real measurements sets as possible.
We were blocked by gmail.com.
It affected the last edition of the newsletter.
Rate was temporarily limited by gmail, but Scaleway kept sending and emails bounced.
Affected our Scaleway reputation score.
A number of gmail FreeSewing users did not receive the last newsletter.
We may need to slow delivery of newsletters in the future, spreading them out, perhaps over multiple days.
90’s era bedroom.
44 Celsius today.
Next meeting will be on FreeSewing’s Jitsi Meet instance.
Again, if people have trouble logging in, they can sign into meeting as guest.
Don’t want to make the Jitsi instance entirely open.
Benefits of FreeSewing integration.
Avoid problems of an entirely-open Jitsi server.
If someone’s audio is lower, can you change their volume on a per-user basis?
Yes, Jitsi has this functionality.
(hover over participant, blue 3 dots menu in upper right, at bottom of pop-up menu).
The preview.freesewing.eu/hangout page is no longer working for me. Specifically, nothing happens when I press either the “Join as Benjamin F.” or “Join as guest” buttons.
