I come here just for the bikeshedding to be honest.
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.
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?
I'm not quite sure I agree with the point you're getting at concerning branding and mass adoption.
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!
But maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's why it's as successful as it is.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.