Linux App Summit 2026 Social Media Retrospective

This is my personal retrospective post – there will likely be some version of this that will go out to various stakeholders.

I want to start off by giving huge praise to our organizing team that worked really hard this year in putting this event together. Couldn’t ask for a better team to work with. Our organizing team is a mix of KDE and GNOME people.

This post will focus on the outreach, fundraising, and social media campaign since that was the bulk of the work I did for LAS this year.

Linux App Summit (LAS) for those who don’t know is a conference organized around the goal of encouraging developing apps on the Linux platform. With
the advent of technologies like Flatpak, we had the technology to be able to ship apps directly to users instead of through the distros. Opening
an opportunity for a bi-directional relationship between app developers and the users of their apps.

This year marks the 10th year I’ve been involved in organizing LAS and its previous incarnation, LAS GNOME. LAS is organized jointly by GNOME and KDE who help fund and promote the conference jointly. It is a showcase of how we can unite and do impactful things.

I was not able to attend this year due to other commitments. I hope other who did attend will weigh in and let us know how it was in-person.

Let’s get to it!

Challenging Myself

I wanted to challenge myself this year and really bring in the kind of engagement  that I could be proud of. I’ve not really had the kind of time I wanted to work on this and it was time to really focus and see what could be done with a proper plan. The goal I wanted to take myself is driving awareness and growing attendance on what our app ecosystem is doing.

What does that entail?

Improving our social media game

The underlying problem I have identified is that Linux and apps was not getting into the headspace of developers. It still felt that this conference was unknown even in our own spaces. We need to break out of Mastodon and start exploring different platforms and content.

In previous years, we were using Buffer since it was free but it was really difficult and unwieldy. We could only schedule 3 days in advance and at times the posts would just drop. We needed to first change the tools we used to really improve our engagement with the world.

With help from the sysadmins at the GNOME Foundation (thank you, GF and Andrea Veri and Bart!), we were able to install Mixpost a self-host social media platform. The two great things about Mixpost is 1) analytics of the posts and social media platforms we were active on and not so active on 2) have a workspace around all our social media accounts and have a team of people working in it with an editorial flow and content calendar. This allowed us to share the workload of posting among many members. For instance, when I wasn’t around, Aryan Kaushik was able to take it over and post. Mixpost is now also being used for various GNOME’s accounts as well. The software continues to improve and hopefully they’ll get around to single-signon support.

With the ability to actually have metrics, the next step is to actually take goals for each of the social media accounts we had and see if we could meet them. Below is a table of the targets I took and the results from February 2026 – May 2026. Instagram was actually started in the beginning of May.

Social Media	Start Count	Target Count	Result
Mastodon	596	796	926
LinkedIn	534	700	619
BlueSky	0	100	39
YouTube	1420	N/A	1610
Instagram	0	N/A	42

Overall, I think we did ok! The high count for Mastodon was because of the great work of the GNOME and KDE accounts on mastodon boosting our posts and helping promoting them before, during, and after LAS. I noticed doing things like polls on mastodon got a lot of attention without needing boosts from the other accounts.

We had decent engagement on LinkedIn. Certainly better than in the past. The trick though is that LinkedIn requires a different lens when you post. Since it is mostly focus on B2B and B2C type of messaging you need to write them differently. I didn’t do it this time because writing social media posts is hard and takes a lot of time and thought.

I didn’t take any goals for YouTube since we did not conceive that we would create content targeted for YouTube. In a spur of the moment, I did a ‘podcast style’ conversation between Matthias Clasen and myself talking about LAS. That gave us about 354 views. Which was encouraging and gives us some idea how organic content on YouTube would be received.

Bluesky was a new account for us. So we started with zero. We gained 39 followers. That might not seem like a lot given the time frame but BlueSky is an interesting platform when it comes to engagement. You can get quite a bit of engagement even if the follower count is low. I think given more time on the platform we’ll be able to make that 100+ if we keep posting content. I think hashtags matter here and playing with the right kind of hashtag and content matters. Bluesky is also was a great experiment when you didn’t have big accounts like GNOME and KDE boosting you.

The media partners we had 9to5Linux, Tuxdigital, It’s FOSS, and Linux Magazine all helped in this regard by using their accounts boost our posts in these other platforms and give us visibility. Thank you to our media partners for helping out and we hope we can work with them closer next year. I’ll like to engage with them further to see how we can help each other out including contributing content. Another idea is to reach out to the speakers of these talks and get them to write some articles that could be contributed based on their talks.

Finally, Instagram. This is an untapped gold mine. I was skimming through the platform looking for GNOME/KDE/Linux desktop type posts to see how well content did. Saw one young lady, who showed off her GNOME desktop with some caption and it gave her 130k views. It was about 10 seconds long. That was impressive. I posted a short video talking about Linux App Summit, and while I got about 130 views – the analytics said most stopped watching after 9 seconds of the 4 minute video I posted. That hurt my pride. I resolved to do better and get better engagement with a 10-15 second video that packed more information and visually more stimulating. As of now the LAS account is still gaining followers despite not posting for 2 weeks. Once again, the media partners helped by liking my posts while the other accounts lay idle.

Working with YouTube Influencers

One other aspects of my plan on boosting the visibility of LAS was to start working with influencers on various platforms. I made a few attempts with a few I knew but was only able to get on one podcast – Tux Digital . Michael Tunnell was kind enough to invite Aleix Pol and myself on his show. For an hour and half, we answered questions and did some bantering. We even went in some organic directions that was fun! I know I had fun, I hope Aleix did too. The exposure was pretty good with approximately 8k+ views for that episode that was 90 minutes. The feedback to the video was very positive with many resolving to attend the conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t set up utm links so that I know where people came from.

Through social media and influencers, we hoped to break out of our media ecosystem and branch out to platforms that developers and Linux enthusiasts hang out and consume content. Meeting where developers are needs to be something we will need to focus on going forward.

Results

The in-person conference was a success, we had 110 people at the conference, the venue capacity was 100. We had 156 people who registered for the conference, this is about a 71% conversion rate. The industry average for free  in-person events is 50%. For LAS, this is unprecedented because we usually had a much worse turnover rate historically. At one point, a few years ago I had started looking into doing registration fees to give people some reason to go and not ghost the conference.

For online this year, we had about 50 online registrations  but it’s hard to gauge anything about online participation since we freely published the YouTube link on social media.

The results for the conference for online had the following results on YouTube :

	2025	2026
Day 1 Views	922	1.7k
Day 2 Views	485	1.5k

The above numbers show views within the 24 hour period of each day. These are really good numbers where we’ve more than doubled our viewership on one of the two days compared to last year. Ostensibly, it shows that our social media did build awareness.

Here is the (still increasing) numbers as of now on Youtube:

First Day: 2k views
Second day: 2.7k views

The videos are currently being broken up into individual talks. But the individual talks as of now are averaging about 300 views or so with the top one being 900+ views for Lennart’s keynote.

The aggregate views for all the 13 individual talk videos posted so far is 4.9k. If we combined that with the combined 2k and 2.7k views, we can simplistically (mathematically speaking) would be 9.6k. Interestingly enough, that is not a big difference from the 8k views of Tux Digital podcast that Aleix and I were on. 😀

In regards, to the people who attended Linux App Summit, 16 people filled out the surveys and by in-large most of the people who attended heard about LAS through word of mouth and not so much through social media. So, that’s an interesting data point. I expect that is because of people like Lorenz Wildberg (thank you!) who did on the ground outreach.

Interestingly, enough our online views were quite good compared to say SCALE which peaked at 7.1k views for one talk but in general the average views was less than the average views than at LAS. Our subject matter is increasingly important.

Also to be clear, views do not translate to people.

Looking towards 2027, we’ll want to increase our in-person attendance while doubling our online views. Something we will be focusing on when we organize for next year.

Next Steps

Our organizing team will be posting relevant individual talks on social media once all the individual videos have been posted. I hope you all share those with everyone.

Secondly, we would love to add more people to our organizing team. Specifically, in order to really build out our outreach we need a lot more people to help network and reach out to developers from different communities and different platforms. This way we can start building relationships with other desktop projects, app developers, game developers, designers not just from Linux but from other platforms as well. For that we need a small army of advocates.