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.