Note to self: mastodon comes with "people who passionately dislike use of the word toot" already filtered out.

* also people who didn’t find it appealing enough to notice. (Seemingly most, looking at the numbers.)

When developers assume qualified UI designers merely wield arbitrary personal preferences, FOSS loses.

- it buttresses a disdain and devaluation of the design discipline, in general

- developers feel entitled to obnoxiously impose their actual arbitrary personal preferences and folk knowledge on the fruit of someone’s intellectual discipline. It’s rarely an improvement.

- designers give up on a FOSS projects in general

- Your see conjecture and debate. Anyone who knows what they’re talking about sees Dunning and Kruger.

the project doesn't use 'toot' anymore and this is like the most trivial concern to have with a piece of software.

Frankly, even besides "toot", Mastodon isn't a particularly appealing name either.

Why is it, without fail, there's always someone in an HN thread making complaints about the name of something they have absolutely no involvement in?

I come here just for the bikeshedding to be honest.

Maybe consider this as constructive criticism? I'm sure a lot of people here are fed up with the existing social media platforms and would want something like Mastodon to succeed, but there's no way it will succeed if it shoots itself in the foot from the beginning with terrible branding.

Until Mastodon (or others) can seamlessly interoperate with existing social networks, they have to gain mass adoption to become useful, which means catering to what the masses think is appealing even if you don't particularly agree with that determination.

I don't have any personal involvement with Mastodon either, I just think it's a cool piece of software and I'm cranky enough to point out a tired trope I see day-in-day-out on this site (name complaints).

Oh absolutely, I agree that it's very cool at a technical level. But I don't believe it's going to succeed at its mission with the current branding.

It is of course open-source software and they don't have to do anything if they're happy with the status-quo, but imagine how better if would be if you had something with the branding & adoption of Twitter and the features & benefits of Mastodon?

Mastodon is pushing releases out the door at a pace I'm happy with - they're at version 3.5 so far since its initial launch of 2016 or so. I'd consider that (and the sustainability of the project) a success. A lot of project maintainers burn out after an amount of time or stall out completely so this is an indicator there's something more here and it's healthy.

I'm not quite sure I agree with the point you're getting at concerning branding and mass adoption.

That’s a good point, about seamless interop with existing social networks.

The EU Digital Markets Act looks like it’s designed to force some messaging interop, and it’s regulation-driven, so it can be refreshed a little more dynamically than most legislation.

Crossing fingers for some movement on the interop front!

FOSS projects never fail to surprise me in their creativity of making weird, unintuitive, terrible names. Just install the damn Linux, list all packages and try guessing what's for what. Even worse than forced codenames in place of distribution versions in digits.

If you ran a company, wouldn't you find it valuable what people reacted to your branding? If you want your FOSS project to succeed you probably similarly would or at least should be interested.

I actually think it's pretty bad-ass. Uncharacteristic of FOSS. A bit clunky sounding, but that makes it feel all the less corporate to me.

But maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's why it's as successful as it is.

If your target audience is only FOSS fans, great. Even a FOSS fans like to socialize with other people and that’s kind of important when you’re choosing a vibe/look/feel for a social network.

FOSSy vs corporate is a false dichotomy. The FOSSy “don’t you dare criticize my logo… I spent a weekend learning Gimp to make it… and yes the G stands for Gnu” aesthetic says “tech-savvy only”. It is off-putting for many, and FAR MORE EXCLUSIVE than any sane corporate design, save luxury brands. It doesn’t signify the lack of an in-club— it is an in-club.

I think that's a bigger problem, though maybe still not a grave one. I wouldn't be surprised if a very high percentage of people write "mastAdon", without autocorrect to save them.

We're also all missing the bigger problem here, which is that "mast" is rooted in the word for "breast". ( /s for the concern, but it in fact is)

It is, for a metal band.

It definitely seems like they do: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/

Wording and branding is not a trivial concern if mass adoption is a goal.

I don't think it's a goal (it's not mine as a user), but I'm sure you can ask Mastodon gGmbH for their OKRs when it's funding time.

When has mass adoption of a social networking platform ever worked out well for users?

When has lacking it worked out well for social networks?

software, sure, name your variables what ever you want, but this is a social network

I still hear toot used to distinguish from tweets, is there a new word suggested? The wikipedia on Mastadon states, 'Posts are called "toots" instead of "tweets", as is the case on Twitter' based on a 2017 article from the Verge so maybe someone should update it.

This is ostensibly a (tech!) startup incubator forum. So it’s a lot of extraordinarily technical and business-savvy people.

It doesn’t take much experience with marketing to cringe at the idea of branding a post a “toot”.

Frankly that decision turned me off to the whole project because it casts doubt on all their other decisions. I’m glad they moved away from it but that definitely harmed adoption.

Only half of the world is stupid, everyone else is pretty much above average intelligence.

I think most people are not really aware of mastodon at all, I'm not sure how much of the problem has to do with the tooting and how much has to do with simply mastodon not having done any marketing whatsoever. Though I hear its popular in Japan?

Not only that but federation does have a higher barrier of entry, in twitter you go into their website and in a few clicks later you can fully experience the website. Mastodon, last time I checked was not so easy. Even a few extra clicks, a few extra decisions make it difficult to onboard people.

> Only half of the world is stupid, everyone else is pretty much above average intelligence

I'm not going to get into a median vs. mean debate here. As far as IQ—or whatever metric you use—goes, I wouldn't be surprised if those 2 numbers were nearly the same.

But what if 80% of us is stupid? Everyone with below-average intelligence, and more than half of us with above-average intelligence? Could be that "Not Stupid" doesn't begin until IQ 110, or 115.

I'd toot it, but that sounds lame.

It's just a joke :)

I would rarely use mean to discuss societal distributions as they can be very misleading (good example of this is when you want to see average versus median income in unequal countries). Though I think IQ is bell-shaped so mean and median coincide or are close.

Thing is, I would never be brave enough to say "80% of us are stupid". People can be smart in many different ways, I know people who are not very good at numbers but are extremely good at picking up languages; isn't that an amazing ability? Funny people, good musicians, creative people... I just really don't like IQ as a metric of intelligence so to me it really falls flat when applied to the real world.

this is the worst HN comment I've read in over a decade on this website, and holyshit have I read a lot of bad comments here

I'm honored.

How is Mastadon beyond the control of its sponsor corporation or the government?

It's open source and can be forked by anyone

This alone does not mean it’s not beholden to governments.

Yeah they should have picked a cool word like "tweet."

In an alternate Twitter-free universe if someone wanted a noun/verb for a deliberately lightweight communication broadcast into the ether over the internet, I'd bank a grand on marketers agreeing that a cheerful, sharp little chirp from a nimble, energetic bird communicates that better than the plaintive sounding crescendo of a giant plodding extinct earthbound mammal which also is outdated slang for a fart.

Mastodons are cool and everything but they don't work for branding a social network. Some rad groundbreaking online museum or library or something else that wanted to viscerally communicate age and wisdom and weight and timelessness? Sure.

I think the negative reaction to the word toot has little to do with the relative uncoolness of the mastadon, I think the issue is that toot has a scatological association.

Not what I’m saying. Toot’s self-evident, multifaceted dorkiness is the most concrete reason people find mastodon uncool. I wouldn’t trust a designer’s cobbled together code for a production project; likewise, developers should delegate these things to domain specialists when image is important. These commenters, largely developers, confidently discounting the importance of visceral appeal in social environments is yet more evidence.

I get that many developers had/have a toxic experience with the concept of coolness, but that doesn’t negate its functionality in this vein.

iirc “tweet” originated among users and was later adopted officially, so by analogy perhaps Mastodon’s mistake is to have unilaterally chosen a term from the outset.

Except this perfectly encapsulated the culture that wanted to abandon Twitter and recognized that it all amounted to shit. It isn't birdsong, it's a fart

Maybe they should seal the deal by doing a s/user/loser in their codebase and really watch the signups roll in!

Google Glass didn't fail because it was dorky, it failed because people understand Google to be a surveillance and advertising company and the prospect of Glass serving as an always on, always streaming, always interpreting Panopticon was too much for people to take.

You're right about "toots," though. At least "tweets" make sense for a site named Twitter, but what is a "toot," a mastodon farting?

People understand that? that must be why people also avoid Gmail, Google Drive, Chrome, Android, Google Search...

It's one thing to use these tools yourself. It's quite another to walk around in public pointing a camera at everyone you look at, all the time.

You're technically correct. Using Gmail, Drive, Chrome, etc., does place a small burden on those you interact with (when they email you, when you store group project files, etc.)

But there's a whole other level of intrusiveness when you're roaming meatspace with a Google Camera in everyone's face.

Oh, and it's dorky as hell. Glass failed on multiple fronts. For the reasons you listed as well as the parent comment.

If concerns about privacy were widespread enough to stop Google Glass, then surely they would have prevented the mass adoption of always listening, always streaming voice assistant devices.

I think that privacy should be a greater public concern, but I doubt it was the reason why Google Glass failed to catch on.

>then surely they would have prevented the mass adoption of always listening, always streaming voice assistant devices

There's something viscerally more creepy about having a camera pointed directly in your face at all times. Try holding your cellphone up to random people at about eye level, you'll see that people do in fact find that at least annoying.

>I think that privacy should be a greater public concern, but I doubt it was the reason why Google Glass failed to catch on.

As I recall, it was the only thing people were talking about.

There's a distinction, though, which I think would matter to people. Smart assistants are things you choose for yourself -- they don't get put in your home without your involvement. Google Glass was something someone else chose for you.

(Also it was very expensive, clunky looking, and buggy. As you say, it's multifaceted.)

So do average people avoid Facebook?

As in "to toot a horn". Like a trunk. Of an elephant. Or a mastodon.

Krapp is right though, "tooting" is also slang in some places for farting.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZUvuvfDQg

It's also old slang for a drinking bender:

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+a+toot

Mastadon really should have done a little more due dilligence before deciding on that term.

Indeed. When you're talking about image, "hey guys it doesn't necessarily mean elephant farts" doesn't work.

Even ignoring that, the word "tweet" viscerally feels light, nimble, quick, and sharp. Toot feels heavier, duller, and more imposing. To end users, the interface is the software and no amount of technical or logistical impressiveness will overcome something being viscerally off-putting. It needs to become attractive in spite of that.

> Even ignoring that, the word "tweet" viscerally feels light, nimble, quick, and sharp.

It did, until Twitter spoiled that. Hearing 'tweet' I somehow get associations with 'trump' (also slang for fart in British English, btw) and 'musk' (a strong odor).

Sure— nothing that visible will stay untarnished forever. Not to everybody, anyway. Starting out pre-tarnished makes it a lot harder to get enough adoption for a brand to withstand that, especially for an image-focused product. Facebook only had the opportunity to become a sad hot mess because they affected preppy ivy league exclusivity instead of launching as "OpenPorpoisePost.org" or some other FOSSy name. We'd never have heard of H&M had they been named "Tootin' Duds".

Yeah, I know. But I'm pretty sure if Twitter'd gone this way and here we had the open-source clone using the name "twitter", we'd all be writing about how hopeless their branding is because it's very easy to make "twit" jokes about it.

[EDIT] nb I don't use Mastodon and don't expect it to take off, but I don't think "toot" is at all the reason for that.

I don't think anybody implied it was the sole reason.

Sure, that's fair. I just think it's so minor that it's not any part of the reason. Companies with all their professional branding experts and such do things that are every bit as easy to ridicule, all the time. Mostly it goes fine and people take it the way it's intended.

Every profession has its gaffes but that doesn't negate the folly of deliberately ill-conceived work done by amateurs. Technically mature infrastructures crashing wouldn't negate the folly of a first-time developer trying to launch a public service with loopdy-looped cargo-culted spaghetti code on a shared host gator VPS.

Adoption is really important for social media to succeed and be useful to its users and image is really important for social media adoption, generally, even if not for you. But I guarantee its influenced your choices more than you could feasibly perceive. Would you still use HN if it used the default bootstrap layouts? Or a ton of slick graphics and heavy animations? Would enough other people be put off by it not to bother?

You can't guarantee everything will strike everyone the same way, but there are wrong answers and it's not even mostly subjective. In an alternate Twitter-free universe if someone wanted a noun/verb for a deliberately lightweight communication broadcast into the ether over the internet, I'd bank a grand on marketers agreeing that a cheerful, sharp little chirp from a nimble, energetic bird communicates that better than the plaintive sounding crescendo of a giant plodding extinct earthbound mammal which also is outdated slang for a fart.

Nobody user is out there weight the pros and cons of the post name when deciding a social network— it's all about that first visceral impression that makes people think "this is cool and exciting" or "this is dull and lame."

Long live tooting!

        _.-- ,.--.
      .'   .'    /
      | @       |'..--------._
     /      \._/              '.
    /  .-.-                     \
   (  /    \                     \
    \\      '.                  | #
     \\       \   -.           /
      :\       |    )._____.'   \
       "       |   /  \  |  \    )
         snd   |   |./'  :__ \.-'
               '--'

I'm not sure who "snd" is, but they drew a nice tooter :)

(hopefully anticipating a "trunk raised, toot blasting" ascii art response worthy of the thread)

> a mastodon farting

While that's not the true meaning behind it, "a mastodon farting" is a good summary for the branding around all these "fediverse" social networks.

As a consumer facing brand, this may be a problem. But as a technology for building custom social media services, I don't think this will harm its adoption at all. I know of two examples already of people modifying Mastodon to build rebranded "alternate" social media networks (Gab and Truth Social,) neither of which still refer to posts as toots to my knowledge.

Silver linings don’t negate clouds. Feedback doesn’t negate accomplishment.

> 54-46 was my number. Right now, someone else has that number.

Dorkiness does not legitimately enter into discussing "Toots" no matter Mastodon's intent.

I hate to say it, but we're 2 years closer to the spirit of 2069.

> Adoption .. critical .. mass adoption .. see it taking off

That's all nice for when on a startup, scaleup, unicorn, megasaurus adventure, but not what this is really about. At least not yet, and I hope it stays that way.

This is about free software projects in a hard-to-monetize decentralized (federated) environment, where a different culture currently thrives. One where all these incentives that made other social media such bad places, are not very prevalent yet (and to some extent can be controlled by moderation mechanisms). The "move fast and break things" growth hacking mindset, if that wins out, will likely destroy this culture. 'Hard-to-monetize' is an advantage in my book, in this regard.

> where a different culture currently thrives

I agree. It is an issue of cultural acceptance. And rest assured, you don't need to educate me about FOSS scene culture— I've been using linux consistently since the 90s and have worked full time developing for FOSS projects for 12 years. The important realization you skipped past was the exclusivity of culture.

Just like Punk cultures, FOSS culture often mistakes itself for an inclusive catch-all for people opposed to a corporate for-profit status quo. Though obviously opposed to corporate status quo, the FOSS scene is an in-club of people who put technical accomplishment above all else. They pride themselves on rejecting user-focus and pushing through awful user experiences. There are cool kids and villains and the look and feel of your projects is the same as subculture fashion.

I can't imagine Mastodon intended to restrict their audience to that 'different culture' but ignoring their perspective certainly had that effect. Eschewing or appealing to people outside of that culture has absolutely nothing to do with profit. None.