Mastodon Renaming “Toots” to “Posts” | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon Renaming “Toots” to “Posts”

github.com

128 pointspitermach99 comments

I know little about Mastodon, but it seems like somebody went out of their way to make the cringiest sounding product possible. “Hey man, I just tooted on mastodon!” It really sounds like parody. I hope I am just missing the point.

You might say this is a superficial criticism, but I think naming is important when it comes to social appeal. At least, it becomes important when the naming has gone so horribly wrong.

If they’re changing course there might be hope yet.

I just googled Mastodon, and I think you're right. Now I'm going to go tweet about it.

Even when 'google' as a verb was brand new, I don't remember it sounding awkward.

and "go ogle" actually has the approximate meaning that "google" took on as a verb (phrase).

I don't find “to toot” sound any stranger than “to tweet”.

In the US, “toot” is not only a word used for something you might do with a horn. It also means “a fart.”

A hilariously bad name if your humor is like that of a child. (Mine is)

My wife, exasperated at our two teenaged boys, asked me if men ever outgrow fart jokes. I laughed, said maybe, then asked her to pull my finger.

Though when primed with the word Mastodon, I did think of the large trunk and a cartoon-like trumpeting of that trunk. Right after thinking how my grandmother would call her farts toots.

Fart jokes have always been found funny at all age and maturity levels. Even Martin Luther made fart jokes:

"When the argument that the Christian is without the law and above the law doesn’t help, I instantly chase him away with a fart."

The oldest known recorded joke, from ancient Sumeria, is a fart joke.

Don't forget Mozart. He even went further with his shit jokes (it was a family affair).[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology

A horn played badly also sounds like farting, so perhaps that's where the second meaning came from.

Toot is a sophomoric word for passing flatulence in the US. So hearing “to toot” summons the mental connection of farting which any marketing person on here will probably tell you people don’t want to be associated with their product.

Indeed. This isn't a question of maturity as some rather bizarre comments in that issue claim. The word is just phonetically and pragmatically asinine. Pick a word that isn't associated with comical bodily noises like "choochoo". Would anyone join a service where you "choochoo" at people? It sounds stupid and infantile. "Tweet" is bad enough. "Toot" goes further.

"toot" means "fart" where I'm from. Imagine a social network where they referred to posts by users as "farts".

"Your fart was shared by 230 of your followers."

"This fart is NSFW"

"This fart has been promoted"

"Pin this fart to the top of your feed"

It does seem like a poor choice of words. Tweeting on the other hand didn't have a negative connotation until Twitter became what it is today and gave it a negative connotation.

fun fact: that was kind of the plot of a letterkenny episode, called "Fartbook", from season 1. it's really good!

https://letterkenny.fandom.com/wiki/Fartbook

That’s a Texas-sized 10-4 buddy!

There is a concept, on forums, of shitposting.

There are common expressions such as "chatting shit" for unverified speculation or "shooting the shit" to mean talking about nothing and everything.

I suspect most of the content on Mastodon, like twitter, is shit. The choice of words seems appropriate.

The difference is that "google" and "tweet" are something the general public is used to, whereas "toot" is not.

I actually just finished twatting about it. Talk about naming things in a cringey - these folks should think through all the verb tenses first.

The past form would be tweeted, no?

For a while I believe that there was a push by twitter for it to be "twittered" but it's a made up word so we can craft our own tenses. To most english speakers tweet having a past tense of twat is perfectly reasonable (unless you're british but enjoy how quickly you speeded over this comment). Companies use BS word creation as a way to get around trademark collision and validity concerns but I strongly dislike the habit of making new words up so you can get an easy registration. I think it's perfectly legitimate to counter their BS with our own BS shaming them over their easy out and I'd encourage other folks to follow in suit. So, until the end of time, the name of that console is the X-Bone.

When you're naming a thing you should be careful and deliberate in your process - generally coincidences will work against you, though you might get lucky and pull a Kit-Kat[1].

1. https://thediplomat.com/2019/08/the-kit-kat-in-japan-a-trans...

> I hope I am just missing the point.

Pretty sure it's a pun for the French `tout suite` -- "right now / ASAP". Pretty clever actually given how much value people place on immediacy on social media...

Almost, it's 'tout de suite'.

You're probably right, since repo is under the "tootsuite" organization. This also explains Hootsuite's name.

I reckoned it was the mastodon tooting its trunk, but now I'm just confused.

I am on Mastodon, and it feels very much like a non-corporate version of Twitter in its interface and content. I am not surprised that they went with "Toots" to match Twitter's "Tweets".

But it mostly doesn't matter whether they called it "Toots" or "Posts" (or Japanese localization of "Toots", which is what I get), since I mostly don't pay any attention to the UI elements after I have gotten used to it. It might make a difference for acquiring new users, but I don't get the feeling that rapidly growing the network is a priority for Mastodon.

Homebrew is awesome and I love beer but the names and metaphors really do not deliver value. I much prefer descriptive names to cute ones.

I have this exact same feeling with some Java programmers' fascination with coffee terminology, especially Beans. Maybe because I grind my own beans at home, it always triggers me in some sort of Pavlovian way.

I'll take a whimsical metaphorical name over a name that is utterly generic and un-googleable any day though.

Looking at you, Go...

I like "Mastodon" because it's awkwardly long and just sort of sticks out this way, but it's still kind of bad-ass. As a counter-culture social network, not like a silicon valley company, I think it fits well.

"Toot" is cutesy and kind of lame, more of the usual I'd expect from the Free Software world. But I don't love the idea of changing it to "posts". I'd rather they find a different clever name.

This is, superficially and stupid as it was, why I never really felt comfortable recommending “FogBugz” bug tracker from Fog Creek software. No disrespect to any capability it may have had, but I couldn’t bring myself to recommend something called that in serious conversation.

No, you're right. It's a stupid verb. Otherwise, why not go with a flarp?

Will Biden toot on Mastodon one day? Will he toot at Kamala Harris?

"Toot" also makes Mastodon look like a cheap knockoff of Twitter that wanted to sound like Twitter without infringing on any trademarks.

Naming is marketing and marketing is 80% of the success when building tech products.

DuckDuckGo is a big one in the stupid naming area. They own duck.com, they suggest using "Duck It" (which kinda works IMO) and they still choose to use the ridiculous "duckduckgo" branding. It's stupid but it's honestly the main reason I'm not using it. That and their crappy duck logo.

I wish they would be wise and rebrand too.

It's not like Google or Twitter ("tweeting" something) is any more serious. They just established themselves in the public consciousness earlier.

They sound better. "DuckDuckGo" sucks. It's even annoying to write.

Apparently Google owned Duck.com ever since it acquired Duck Corp. in 2010[1], and only 2-ish years ago transferred the domain to DuckDuckGo.

However, Duck is rather generic-sounding and will require $$$ in ad-spend to get name recall. Even though it's awkward, DuckDuckGo is certainly memorable, sometimes that works in a product's favour.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck...

Yeah, Apple is definitely the best company name ever invented. /s

I approve.

No one asked me, but if they had, I'd have opined that the pre-cuting of your nomenclature is usually the result of too much time spent thinking about branding and not enough time building features.

Note that "tweet" was spawned organically by the community, and Twitter did not adopt the word formally for a couple years after it was in popular use.

> is usually the result of too much time spent thinking about branding and not enough time building features.

Uh, I think you might have it backwards there. The Mastodon folks probably didn't spend enough time thinking about branding.

I feel it's more that they spent too much thinking about branding but they were just not very good at it.

It was done entirely on the whims of a joke 5 years ago when mastodon was at single-server scale: https://mastodon.social/@Hbomberguy/146524

I’m pretty sure there are still some people who were on Twitter early, are grumpy that “tweet” was what caught on, and still say “toot” in regards to posting Twitter statuses.

> Note that "tweet" was spawned organically by the community

It took the community to tell Twitter the obvious:

> twitter v. (of a bird) give a call consisting of repeated light tremulous sounds.

> tweet n. a chirping note.

Seems that a 3rd party application popularised the term, avoiding yet another faux-pas:

> One Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, had been testing the beta releases of Twitterrific. Early that month, Cook sent Hockenberry an email suggesting changing the word “twit” to “tweet.” Hockenberry immediately made the change.

> twit n. a silly or foolish person.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-origin-of-the-word-tw...

> It took the community to tell Twitter the obvious:

This made me laugh, because it's basically the Twitter Story.

In fairness, with such an enormous community and such a tiny (exposed) application surface, this is probably a natural law -- akin to the creative games kids will invent with rocks and sticks. :)

As someone who doesn’t use Mastadon, I immediately went to the toots -> farts connection.

I get that a Mastadon is an elephant, elephants trumpet or “toot”, so, toot is a post. A lot of people are going to think of farts though.

I didn't realize they were meant to be trumpets, I thought it was a deliberate lambasting of the implied quality of tweets or whatever.

Huh. Posts it shall be.

>I thought it was a deliberate lambasting of the implied quality of tweets

You are not alone

Likewise, I've never heard it used in a different way. At best, in my head, it was an onomotopoeia that could be used for the sound a kazoo or paper trumpet makes... but usually a fart.

Same. As an American, I would be much less likely to use or spread good word about a product that centered around the act of "tooting". Our culture sees the word as silly, childish, and a bit gross. I could get used to it eventually, but if it's the first thing I see about the product, I'm probably going to find something else to use that doesn't make me think of farting or introduce fart terminology into my everyday word choice.

Yes. If you wanted to be charitable, the other connotation is tooting your own horn, which isn't that great either. Bragging is better than farts, though.

Being a native English speaker from another country I don't possess this association at all, and have to dig quite deep to remember that Americans do.

I do get tootsuite => toute de suite i.e. a sense of immediacy, the present moment, with greater impact for being a bilingual pun. Along with that, the onomatopoeic elephant.

Cynical take: notwithstanding the denial in the PR, that original author knew the scatological allusion, and that it has parochial scope, i.e. they actively intended to annoy Americans, and in particular those with a prim streak.

As a very young child & native American English speaker, I was told the rhyme,

Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot.

That cemented the association with farts, but 'toot' as in 'toot your own horn' (idiom for self-promotion), or even just literally tooting a horn, are also strong associations. So it's not exclusively, or primarily, a word for farts to my ears – but that's one of the top few potential meanings.

Beans, beans, they're good for your heart. The more you eat them the more you fart.

Yes, this is the rhyme I learned as a kid, warning against the gastrointestinal consequences of oligosaccharide consumption but extolling the cardioprotective nutrients they accompany.

The GP form I have never encountered before, and by my assessment falls short in pedagogical qualities.

I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be musical fruit.

That's why they make you toot.

It’s apparently a variant. I realized that the “magical” version was much more common than I’d expected a couple of years ago and did some informal research. It seems about evenly split, and I didn’t see any regional correlation.

I'm not surprised. That's why there are qualifiers.

It's not intended as smack talk asserting "My variation is better than yours!" (Throws down gloves.)

Sometimes, it's nigh impossible to readily come up with the wording that captures the myriad thoughts flitting about my mind and account for all possible social bits and potential misinterpretations. And I comment anyway, knowing it's likely to go sideways cuz hoomans.

The "musical" form seems more refined, bringing poetry to a variant that is otherwise botanically problematic and nutritionally attenuated.

I'm having trouble deciding if you are tugging everyone's leg or being straight up serious or tugging everyone's leg by being straight up serious.

Sometimes that last is funnier, though usually only to the person doing it.

Well, the entire discussion deriving from the proposed code change is ultimately debating the relative merits of a fart joke, so any contribution is bound to be a gas.

... and by virtue of the contribution being a gas, it expands to fill the entire containing volume - in this case, the discussion we’re having.

That makes total sense.

As a Canadian "musical fruit" still makes you fart. It is some nice potty humour.

Note, this is botanically incorrect. Leguminous plants, as compared to angiosperms generally (and most starkly when compared to those with pericarpal fruits), may have differential edibility: that is, beans are not the fruit; the seed pod is the fruit (i.e. the mature ovary of the flower), and beans are an edible seed contained within the pod. Some legumes with edible pods (notably phaseolus vulgaris, the "green bean" or haricot verts) are known as beans in the culinary vernacular, but this is solely by common name, and does not hold up to anatomical scrutiny.

Regular correspondents to this forum may also encounter Java beans, but be warned that their palatability is disputed, and ungoverned use, particularly in their enterprise form, can lead to buildup of toxic and irrevocable technical debt.

I am not a native English speaker, even if I am flattered that nowadays you can't tell

I take it as self deprecating. Most things people write online is shit- including my comment. Get off your high horse, you aren't special, you're making farting noises online.

FYI it's MastOdon, not MastAdon. This mistake occurs a lot. Maybe it's another issue with the naming by the way.

> The word “toot” is a part of mastodon, it fits, people know what you mean. If you take that away you take away a part of mastodon’s soul.

Proof people will react dramatically to basically any change, I guess.

More importantly, as Blikkentrekker has pointed out, this hasn't been merged yet, and in fact from the comments seems to be very unpopular. Possibly it won't be merged at all.

> people know what you mean

If someone tells me "hey wanna toot with me" I certainly don't think I'd have a clue what they meant.

If someone said "I tweeted about that" 15 years ago, would you have had a clue?

If someone said "I Googled it" 20-whatever years ago?

I assumed you were referencing some obscure philosopher, but it turns out Blikkentrekker is just a hn username. I guess it's still the case!

I'll be sad to see "toots" go away. I understand it was unintentional (I believe an interview with the creator on a podcast stated: "As for 'toots'...[he] just thought that was the sound an elephant makes."), but as a commentary on the average quality of discourse on social media, it was brilliant.

But it wasn’t commentary. It was His mistake. Everyone knows that Elephants go VROOOOONNANMMMMMMOHFJFF

Right? No? Nobody?

Lame. There's nothing wrong with something being a little bit funny and irreverent. Not everything needs corporate marketing polish.

I assumed it was making fun of Twitter. Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that it wasn't intentionally using "toot" as a double entendre.

Classic bikeshed discussion; it's so much easier to argue over "toot" than actually fix technical issues, so everyone will chime in.

It's amusing that the issue is the use of "toot" to refer to a post, which in English is used in the standard idiom of "toot your own horn", directly relevant to the platform's purpose as a social medium.

Meanwhile, the real elephant in the room, is the completely non-sequitur name for the platform - 'Mastodon', best known as an Ice Age giant fauna and also the name of an American heavy metal band that is still one of the top hits on Google for that name.

Whatever they call posts on the platform, the fact is that its usage will remain identically at a few percent of Twitter's.

Imagine Mastodon was planning this all along. A card up their sleeves for increasing adoption. They named them toots (which is silly to begin with and likely captures attention) JUST so they could change it to posts and get more eyes on a hn post like this.

Genius marketing.

How sad to see this piece of culture fading (or maybe it's not?). Luckily the Mastodon code base is merely a recommendation and lots of instances use custom names. I can see many sticking with toots.

cybre.space uses "ping" to fit the retro hacker theme

Aww. I liked "toot", it was kinda whimsical and fun. "Post" sounds a bit dull and corporate by contrast.

All social media activity should be called "wanks"*

*including this post

Toot (Oxford Languages): a snort of a drug, especially cocaine. "he still likes a toot"

They’re still gonna be “rars” on my instance, whatever Garg does on his.

> Videos on YouTube aren't yeets

This guy needs an open mic

This change would be better probably, although, aren't the messages called "notes" in the W3C terminology? Of course, the verb is "post", and I think the noun should be "notes" to be consistent with the W3C terminology probably (which can reduce confusion, I hope).

Yes, the objects are notes, but the verb is create. That being said, I don't see why the underlying terminology which is essentially more like a programming language keyword has to seep through to the UI.

O, you are right; the verb is "create"; I forgot.

Relevant Duke Ellington - Toot Toot Tootie Toot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wazevw-uIDA

I also cannot get around the fart connotation.

Reminds me of back when Twitter was getting popular and everyone realized "twatted" was no longer an appropriate term.

Where does it say in the discussion that it was accepted?

Someone suggested that it be done, and most seem to be against and no conclusion has been reached at the bottom, as far as I can tell.

Gargron is the lead developer of Mastodon

That doesn't mean the PR is guaranteed to be merged, let alone already merged, as the submission title implies.

it doesn't, I added the comment for context in case other readers are not aware (@ "someone")

update: merged

AFAICT the PR author is actually the #1 developer of Mastodon and also authored the original change of renaming "posts" to "toots".

It shows "Changes Approved" at the bottom. I've never done any collaboration work on github, does that mean it's happening?

It means that another mastodon developer (ykzts) reviewed and approved the code. However, the commits haven't been merged to the main branch yet.

no, that just means someone has given approval. The more relevant bit to "will this be merged" is that Gargron is pretty much the BDFL of Mastodon.

Mastodon is open source, but Gargron 'owns' it and does most of the dev. He does what he wants, and he approves or not what other people want to do

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