TDF's presence on X

Back when this thread was active, Twitter/X’s owner was already supporting neo-nazi parties around the world.
And more recently, its genAI tool, Grok, has been used for creating CSAM and other disgusting things on a large scale.

I’ve said elsewhere before, but I’ll say it here again: I am also for LibreOffice and TDF leaving that platform. And replace the “Twitter” link with our Bluesky account on the main website’s footer, and possibly exploring other social media platforms if needed / if the Marketing team has the capacity.

Hi,

A few months ago I updated the LibreOffice website footer (for the English site) to remove most X/Twitter links (eg @AskLibreOffice), leaving only @libreoffice remaining. I also reordered them to put the Mastodon ones first, lowering the importance of the X/Twitter link. I might remove the Twitter/X link entirely now…

But the question of whether we should be there at all is worth discussing. Part of me agrees that it’s not a nice platform, sure, and there are arguments to leave. But there are arguments to stay, too, primarily as a way of reaching potential users. All the other major office suites are on there, and many other FOSS projects and organisations are still active on there too.

So it’s a decision we have to make carefully. What do others think?

Leave X for good! Or install a bot that responds when mentioning #Libeoffice with “Follow us on Fosstodon” (not sure if Bluesky’s concept fully matches our mission).

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I think it’s an argument hard to win. :wink:

We should be where a potential audience is. This does not mean we endorse a specific media or platform. However, if we are only on truly free and open platforms, we are preaching to the choir and only reach those who likely know about us already.

If we want to tell our story how good free and open source is and open standards are, we should tell it in particular on closed platforms, to reach those who don’t know it yet.

I would leave the political discussion aside (my grandfather Italo Modestini, a former dean of the University of Perugia who always refused to join the fascist party, was killed by the fascists in 1945). Although I second Florian’s opinion about closed platforms, I would close TDF Twitter account, as the project’s account, and I would reduce the activity of the LibreOffice Twitter account to a minimum, for major announcement and for reactive communications (answering questions, and redirecting people to open channels such as Mastodon). At the same time, I would get rid of the links to the Twitter account on all web properties.

LibreOffice must be where the public is.

Leaving X, Google, Facebook, Whatsapp and others is not helping LibreOffice in the office suite marketplace.

OnlyOffice, MSOffice, WPS, CollaboraOffice and other office suites have no issues in using these services. Good for them. They have money and workforce to drive social networking on their advantage.

Despising social networks is a bad move.

Olivier
PS: LO user groups in Facebook are full of users (mostly) happy with LO but asking for help or exchanging tips and tricks.

I completely agree with Italo’s recommendation. As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message” and to believe any channel can be used neutrally without reflecting on TDF and its values is naive.

Just to be clear, we’re talking about one specific, highly controversial social network here. It’s not about “despising” them as a whole or leaving all the other ones you mentioned.

I agree that we need to be where the public is, but with some considerations. Truth Social is estimated to have six million users, and we could potentially reach people there, but we obviously want to steer clear of that one…

The question is always “where to draw the line”, and everyone might have a different view here.

We can also argue about our Telegram groups, whether to close them and migrate to Matrix.
We can also discuss whether we should work on e-mail deliverability to big providers, or only support those true to open source and free software.

IMHO we can rule out Truth Social, as I doubt it has ever been used for our message, whereas for the others, we do have existing followers.

This could be a worthwhile compromise actually. We could post short teasers, to keep people informed, and have a “Find out more on xyz” and point to other platforms. Should Twitter still block Mastodon links, we could link to our blog, and there prominently feature other networks.

Could be a way to have “the best of both worlds”.

Seems exactly what the public sector & federal ministries have been doing here since about a year.

As that platform has not gotten any better in the past 12 months, it appears to be an evidently appropriate middle ground, how to deal with the situation.

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I fully support this compromise.

The platform formerly known as Twitter, Facebook and others should not be used as a primary mean of promoting TDF and LibreOffice but should be present anyway stating clearly that our preferred mean of communication is our blog and Mastodon.

Add the link to TDF’s and LibreOffice’s Mastodon accounts to their respective profiles in those platforms and link the posts to Mastodon using the URL shortener so that more people discover it and hopefully will migrate to it.

Both TDF and LibreOffice should be more active also on LinkedIn with teasers that then lead to Mastodon and our blog as that’s another bubble where we should tell people what we do and that alternatives exist.

I agree completely with Olivier.

We can reach out and help on all platforms (if the help assets are
there) and gently “massage” people to join in on on a LibreOffice
platform of choice. Especially on FB where there are more than 3billion
members who could all be using LibreOffice! Note that FB still has
growing numbers.

Marc

Yes, we’ve been active on Facebook for years, and have grown our follower count a lot recently (from 64,000 in December 2024 to 75,000 in December 2025).