Yeah I thoroughly disagree with this one. They are an amazing band, and the name really evokes a sense of what they are - massively loud beasts of heavy metal. Fuckin rock on
As a fan of the dinosaur era of power rangers, mastodon was one of the coolest to me.
Brachiosaurus and I'll fight you on that (Black dino ranger)
\m/
It’s long
Eight letters, and 7~9 segments depending on the language. Compare it with other common brands like Facebook, Coca-Cola and Volkswagen.
it’s difficult to pronounce in most languages.
I'm casting doubt on this claim, based on the following:
doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue
This is subjective. Personally I think that plenty brands there are considerably worse in this aspect. With a notable mention: that phonotactic trainwreck called Threads. (Four consonants in a syllable, two of them exotic [for most languages at least]? No. Just no.)
Twitter is available. 😁
Lemmy isn't great either.
I think it sounds pretty cute!
i disagree with just about every point of this, good job!
Thank you!
rename it Y
Split your lungs with blood and thunderrrr!!!
Wait, wrong Mastodon.
Only card to me is the ACE OF SPADES!
Wait, other correct Lemmy 😉
I just saw them a couple weeks ago, killer live show.
I rather like it.
Yep that's what this community is for
Tech nerds kinda like to name things stupidly. I find myself doing that too. Because overall, I'm not looking to market/brand it and make millions. Many of my projects were proof of concepts or passion ideas that if the open-source world thinks there's value, other nerds will let it grow.
I came to this conclusion as I thought about WINE for Linux. It's a silly name.
But when Valve built Proton, they were intentional in the name sounding "marketable".
We learned this with 'blogosphere' years ago, and now 'fediverse'.
Will you change your mind if I tell you that the "masto" in mastodon means "breasts"? ;P
what else would you call a service where you post toots?
FartBox
Tooter
I think they officially changed the name to posts, rather than toots. But I always did feel like that held back the platform from being taken seriously. Like, can you imagine a news reporter saying, “Responding to the rise in reported domestic terrorism, President Biden tooted to the nation…”
I mean, how much dumber is that than "tweeted"? We just get numb to it eventually.
Tweet was definitely normalized over time, but it also isn’t a synonym for fart so there’s that.
Tweet at least had a clever background. Along with the bird mascot.
The whole thing was based on people just chirping about like birds, but it also played into the common saying of “a little birdie told me” when you want to tell someone something you know from someone else you know without telling them how you know it. Like when your gossiping with a neighbor about something another neighbor told you about them, you’d say “a little birdie told me that they saw you at the sex shop down town, you and Bob doing alright?”
Every kid in the English language also learns that birds say tweet tweet, and “the bird tweeted”. So it made sense that when you’re the little birdie, the things you say are tweets.
Slap the bird on it and it’s intuitive without explaining anything because pretty much everyone who learned English as a child has it deep in their brain already. And birds are cute. Everyone loves birds.
In contrast, a toot is a less crass thing you say when someone farts.
Also not using a relatively unknown extinct animal as your mascot for a platform you’re trying to bring to life is probably a good idea. Everyone knows what a wooly mammoth was, but not as many know what a mastodon was.
It's a way better name than X, or Xwitter, or whatever the Fffff that site calls itself these days.
Agreed. We prefer Mumakil, my precious.
Mastadons are amazing and hence Mastadon is an amazing name.
Cutting it short to 'Masto' would be the best idea tbh. Nice and short without making a huge change.
Apparently that means tits
That's makes it even better. Everyone loves tits
True (well, almost true), but I'm not sure everyone will want to ask people to "follow me on tits" 😄
If you close your account, are you off your tits?
I vastly prefer Don. Or, if you must, Tits. Masto is tits and chewing
Tooties 👀
Please, just do not. Do not shorten any name or word. It sounds terribly, as if some wannabee-cool marketeer without a basic dignity of language-user invented it.
I couldn't stop spelling it Mastadon .... I even spelled it wrong in my id I gave to people. 😀
Doesn't matter, other services implementing the ActivityPub standard can have names easier to pronounce by non-English speakers, like Misskey, and the two can interact.
I think it's a cool name. And I dunno if it's still a thing but I remember back in the day posts were called toots or something, which I approve of. :P
I like it because it reminds me of the dinozords from MMPR. To see the whole set coming together as one federation would be hilarious/awesome.
The first time I heard of Mastodon I thought it was a drug similar to Methadone
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