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."