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The Open Web is Vibrant, and Vital to 2025

Austin Spires

Sr. Director of Product Management

Jenn Turner

Content Strategist

Culture Customers Industry insights

It may seem that online experiences are becoming increasingly isolated. However, it has never been easier to make an impact by bringing an idea to life on the web. Fastly understands that this crucial step — taking an idea from zero to one — is only possible through the vibrant ecosystems of open web, open education, and open-source initiatives. That’s why we continue to support these networks through our Fast Forward program. Our members make a difference in every corner of the internet in countless ways—many of which you encounter every day. Here are just a few of their achievements from 2024. Here’s to an even more impactful 2025!

Hundreds of millions of students learned on the web💡

Education is the foundation of the web, so we’re proud to support program members like the Khan Academy, who make free, high-quality education accessible to over 170 million learners globally. This year, they were featured on the news program 60 Minutes about their latest pilot project, Khanmigo Writing Coach, an AI-enabled instructional tool whose purpose is to produce better writers.

“This experience allowed us to share our vision for education and show how artificial intelligence can empower learners and teachers alike,” said Sarah Robertson, principal product manager of Literacy and Classroom. Learn more about KhanMigo in this behind-the-scenes story of Khan Academy’s appearance with Anderson Cooper on CBS’ 60 Minutes. 

In 2022, Scratch, the world’s largest coding community for children, crossed the 100 million learners milestone. In 2024, Scratch reached its 1 billionth project created milestone and began work on reaching the next 100 million children.

“We are developing a website for the Scratch Foundation’s ’100 Million More‘ campaign, through which we aim to raise $30 million to support the development of the next generation of Scratch and to ensure it remains free and accessible to all kids for the foreseeable future,” said Kate Littlefield from the Scratch Foundation. “We anticipate that by the platform’s 20th anniversary in 2027, an additional 100 million kids will have joined our online community! That said, we would like to recognize the Foundation’s catalytic supporters, and Fastly is a critical source of support for Scratch.”

See the 2024 collection of Year in Review projects from Scratch learners.  

👉 In the mood to learn something new yourself? Check out this guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance from program member, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Nearly 1 million requests per second made by Fast Forward members*

Many of your favorite open source projects, in fact, the languages and tools you build with, rely on our global network, and we’re very proud to support them. Fastly has delivered over five trillion requests on behalf of the open source projects we support, but what they’ve delivered to the open web with that support is far greater. 

OpenStreetMap, a community-created map of the world free to use turned twenty years old this year. To celebrate, they introduced vector tiling and a campaign to diversify their project membership, but maintainers Paul Norman and Mikel Maron agree one of the largest milestones was, ”continuing to serve over 1PB per month and close to 100 billion requests a month to several hundred million users.”

The Rust community brought together Rustaceans in a big way this year, gathering 650 of them in Montreal for RustConf. The project also focused on security and interoperability, launching several new initiatives to make crates.io more secure, and bridge the gap between Rust and C++, to name a few.

The Ruby community published their first Annual Open Source Report last year which revealed that over 34 billion gems were downloaded, and Bundler was downloaded 570 million times. Last, but not least, RubyConf 2024 was the community’s biggest event since the pandemic with over 600 attendees, and even featured the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, as a keynote speaker!

In 2024, JavaScript turned 29 years old, the OpenJS Foundation announced the return of JSConf US 2025, and they partnered with Fastly, meaning that if you used jQuery CDN, you’ve already been using Fastly! From our post back in October: 

In fact, jQuery CDN is a critical part of the modern web, serving over 2.4 petabytes of bandwidth and almost 70 billion web requests in the last 30 days. In August 2024, our systems served 33,000 requests per second at peak.

LLVM, the compiling infrastructure project, had an exciting year with over 37k contributor commits, writing 35.5 million lines of code. Read the full recap post of their 2024 for more details.

In 2024 jsDelivr, the open-source CDN, served 260 billion monthly requests, exceeding an 8.5 billion requests per day average, and launched their first product, Globalping.

1.7 billion lines of code created in the Linux ecosystem 

2024 was another record year for the global Linux community, with 4.2 million project builds and over 70,000 active contributors, and 2025 is shaping up to be equally interesting. Here are some of the project wins from that community, represented by these program members:

  • This year the openSUSE project, a user-friendly distribution, announced enhanced multi-GPU switching support via switcherooctl, which is huge news for Linux users seeking greater performance for gaming and GPU compute. 

  • Void Linux, a general-purpose operating system based on the Linux kernel, increased support for Raspberry Pis, and upgraded their buildbot, which is managed via the Nomad orchestration system.

  • Gentoo, a Linux metadistribution, had a very strong year, with a 2.4% increase in project commits from 121,000 to 123,942. The number of commits by external contributors has grown to 12,812, across 421 unique external authors. You can read about all of the project highlights, in their year retrospective post.

  • The Alma Linux community spent a lot of time together in 2024, wrapping up the year by attending 9 events in the final four months, and continues to gain popularity as the de facto replacement for CentOS.

8 million and counting signed on for the social web 

We’ve been strong supporters of the Fediverse from the start, so watching the Mastodon team and community grow has been encouraging for lovers of the open web. With a user base of 8.8 million, in 2024 the team released Mastodon 4.3, a major update that added important safety features, usability improvements, and a feature to highlight journalists when posts link to their articles.

Mastodon also raised €200k from the EU’s Next Generation Internet funds to foster innovation in the Fediverse; and have become supporters of the Social Web Foundation, dedicated to a “growing, healthy, sustainable and multi-polar Fediverse.”

Speaking of social webs, one constant theme throughout the year was definitely connection – people are craving community. Luckily, 2025 will be rich with industry events, especially from our large community of program members.

📅 Upcoming 2025 Program Member events to add to your calendar 

Learn more about Fast Forward, Fastly’s sponsorship program for eligible open source projects and nonprofits. We provide our program members and the foundations that enable them with free services, and access to marketing, community, and event support. 

*Based on annualized data from 10/20/24 to 01/17/25

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