TDF and LibreOffice website, blogs and social media – Annual Report 2024
Our two main websites are vital sources of information for The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice software. We also use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
TDF website
The Document Foundation website provides general information about the foundation (overview, statutes, code of conduct, financials and reports) and its governance (board of directors, membership committee, members, advisory board, and engineering steering committee), and about LibreOffice certification, including a list of certified developers, and professionals for migrations and trainings.
During 2024, the foundation’s website was visited 98,499 times, with 146,456 page views – a slight reduction in visits but also a slight growth in page views from 2023. Continent-wise, the largest chunk of visits were from Europe (52%), followed by North America (24%) and Asia (16%). And regarding software: the most visits were from PCs using the Windows (65%) operating system, followed by GNU/Linux (10%) and macOS (8%) and devices uses Android (6.2%), while for browsers: Chrome had 39%, followed by Firefox (16%) and Microsoft Edge (15%).
LibreOffice website
The LibreOffice website provides information about the office suite and the document format, the various download options, how to get help, how to contribute to the project, events where users can get to know the LibreOffice community, and how to make a donation to support the project and the community.
In 2024, we continued to make improvements and tweaks to the website, updating the “Discover” and “New Features” sections of the site to reflect new versions of the software.
During 2024, the English-language LibreOffice website was visited 19,298,517 times (a 0.6% gain over 2023), with 46,065,236 page views (a 0.1% gain). Most visits were from Europe (52%), followed by Asia (20%), North America (15%) and South America (9%), from PCs using the Windows operating system (82%), followed by macOS (6%) and Linux (23%). Regarding web browsers, Chrome was the most popular (41%), followed by Microsoft Edge (29%) and Firefox (13%).
Blogs
TDF’s blogs (like this one) are essential for communicating activities inside and around the project, including new releases of LibreOffice, community events and support for other free and open source initiatives. In 2024, we used them to post regular interviews with community members and provide updates from team members about documentation, marketing, QA, design and more.
Blogs were also maintained by various native language communities including Japanese, Spanish, German and others. Thanks to the hard work of community members, we had press releases, tips and other articles translated into many languages, and picked up by local media organisations.
These native language blogs complement the information provided by the main blog in English, and by the two blogs managed by members of the design and the quality assurance projects, which provide updates about activities for the upcoming major releases.
In 2024, the blog had 100,180 visits and 131,174 page views – a drop in both cases of around 30% from the previous year. The press releases for LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8 were the most popular posts, followed by the posts about the German state of Schleswig-Holstein moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice.
Social media
In January 2024, our X (formerly known as Twitter) account (@LibreOffice) had 63,060 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 68,870. Our most popular posts were for major releases of LibreOffice, and news about migrations to the suite. We posted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.
In addition, we focused not only on our own posts, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice community members. We liked and reposted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we reposted popular older tweets, and responded to individual messages.
On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2024 we worked more on expanding our activities on our account @libreoffice@fosstodon.org, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 25,440 to 29,326. We also joined Bluesky in late 2023 thanks to invites from a community member, and by December 2024 our follower count had reached 2,900.
Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 63,348 page followers to 64,239. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards other social media platforms. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.
YouTube channel
Our YouTube channel grew from 20,638 subscribers and 3,243,107 video views in January 2024 to 22,586 subscribers and 3,534,370 video views by the end of the year. The most popular videos were the “New Features” videos for LibreOffice 24.2 and 24.8, and we also added videos of talks, presentations and workshops from the LibreOffice Conference 2024.
At the end of 2024, we posted the first video from the new LibreOffice Podcast series, where Italo Vignoli and Mike Saunders from TDF talked about the challenges and opportunities in marketing free and open source software like LibreOffice. More podcasts are planned for 2025.
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