Mastodon Branding Update | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon Branding Update

blog.joinmastodon.org

69 points_fnqu45 comments

Obviously there's no 'rules' on it, but I'm surprised Mastodon is big and profitable enough to be paying a 'design agency' to change its logo's colour from blue to purple and make some 'subtle shape fixes that makes it look more precise'..?

Maybe I'm naïve, just seems like a very enterprisey, 'who really cares', marketing-optimisation (when it's already really good and established) sort of thing to do to me.

As with any consulting, cost is factor of scope, time and "prestige" of the consulting company. How many different design concepts are created before narrowing down and how long it takes iterating on a single design to finish? How many branding documents get created (Style guides, font guides, templates). Is there any additional campaigns associated with the branding? The more well known and established success a consulting company has will allow them to charge more on projects.

In the past, I worked at a large marketing consulting in the technology side and it was costly to hire us. I later worked at a 10 person startup that updated branding for three real-estate related brands. The startup could never afford the former at that size, but did fine with smaller, local consulting company.

I think the point is that all of this 'work' is a complete waste of time.

Two things:

One of Mastodon's weak points against its competitors is its approachability, so I think the design is a good thing to focus on.

They say they are getting a discount in exchange for Oak's sponsorship - there's no telling how steep that discount is, but I imagine it's pretty significant.

1) Design can be extremely inexpensive. You can find people who are experienced and "good" (whatever that means to you) who can do logo/colors/fonts for <$1,000.

2) This is now functioning as an ad for the agency, so they may have offered a discount.

It would be nice if they also didn’t call tweets “toots”. It’s a minor thing and I recognize this is a me problem but I can’t help but think of verbal flatulence when I hear it.

Interpreted that way, it accurately describes the quality of the average post on any microblogging platform

I really like it, as a fun reminder not to take social media all too seriously. Plus a 'toot' is definitely a sound you can imagine an elephant making.

It's not a you problem. Many people have an issue with this.

"Toots" were renamed to "posts" in April 2021.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

Oh, nice! And for the reasons that bothered me.. so maybe it wasn’t just me.

I wish we collectively chilled out about how insignificant things are named.

I find it tells me more about the person complaining than the thing they're complaining about

Honestly I think for me it goes back to the “beans beans the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot” song but if you were able to diagnose some deep seated personality defect on my part instead based on my reaction I would love to learn more. :)

I have been struggling to get friends and family onto Signal, which is a very vanilla application by most standards.

If I'd tried to move them from Twitter/whatever to Mastodon and had to explain what a "toot" is, it would've made it that much harder.

Luckily toots are no longer the word Mastodon uses, so it's now irrelevant.

As bad as "toot" was, I still think it's better than "truth".

Owned by a guy called Trump, which gets some sniggers in en-GB.

Vouching for this (it was dead) as a fellow Briton, and commenting to explain:

'to trump' has the same meaning as 'to toot' in the complaints here - i.e. 'to fart'.

I.e. this isn't really partisan commentary or anything to flag - it's just amusing that a sort of competitor to the platform being criticised for calling its posts a slang term for farting is owned by someone whose name happens to be another one.

(And to be really clear, that slang term isn't somehow named for Trump, it predates him. Or certainly his international prominence anyway.)

I don’t know about that, my kids don’t run around the house saying “I just truthed”

I love that feature, if it prevents a number of hackernews from posting on or joining fedi, it's working as intended imo

So they're moving from blue to purple to avoid what everyone else is doing, when everyone else is doing the same?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31913362

Marketing people are some of the least creative people. There's clearly some fad in their industry, and they're pitching it to everyone and making bank.

I feel bad for the mastodon people being swindled like this.

Now it looks like Discord

specifically, half of discord

https://discord.com/branding

But they're still calling it "mastodon"?

What’s wrong with that?

Well, it (accurately?) conveys that they're deader than the dodo.

Got curious about who else is sponsoring Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors

Though not completely surprised, I must say this collection of logos is a bad look for Mastodon's mainstream adoption. >80% of the sponsors are suspicious looking casino and adult sites.

Weird. Seems like they used to have much more technical sponsors in the past. Hopefully this doesn't mean that a financial crisis is looming?

Mastodon being sponsored by porn sites means a financial crisis is coming? What?

Interesting indeed - although I see it opposite.

Personally I find gambling sites (and alcohol ads amongst other things) abhorrent, however when I see sponsors listed like these it makes me feel that the portal has less censorship than [insert news / tech giant / etc here]

Which gives me hope / faith that a thing could be bigger / better than the narrow [other] -

It's like if there are only a dozen or so 4 color printing presses in the world - I'd want to support the one that prints Hustler magazines.. like Larry Flynt said something like 'if they censor me, whats to stop them from censoring you or anyone else'

I realize I am a bit of on outlier (I assume) than the 'mainstream adoption' group you may be referring to.

I also think 99% of the 'mainstream adopters' never look for nor care about a sponsors page.

Doesn't seem like that bad of a look to me. There's always been a bit of a symbiotic relationship between online anonymity/decentralization/freedom movements and "seedier" websites, so it doesn't really surprise or concern me too much that one of Mastodon's sponsors sells sex dolls.

Taco hell has been spending effort purplating its stores, too. Perhaps we are entering what will be known to history as the Purple Era.

If I had to guess: it's a client for easy integration between Teams and Discord with a Bootstrap front-end.

So Discord?

Hmm, just me who feels similarity with Twitch? I mean the icon and color scheme, it makes Twitch easy to find on my phone but now I'll have two similar ones.

They're "going purple" but where is it? I only see black and blue on the page.

It announces a plan. The post says it takes two months.

The logo is purple, objectively.

I might be color blind, or it's my monitor. It just looks blue to me.

Honest question - who cares? Who cares about this app, much less the color of their logo?

Millions of people use Mastodon.

Doubtful!

Just a small correction here. Millions of people use the Fediverse.

Whilst Mastodon brands itself as it's own platform, it's really just one of the many freely available solutions that are used to socialise on the fediverse.

It's a shame that they seem to make an effort to hide this fact when other solutions such as Pleroma and Misskey make it very clear what the Fediverse actually is and that you can use a vast array of software to connect to it.

I actually based that on my memory of the last time I checked fediverse stats. It's currently 1.6 active and about 4 total. Okay, not millions plural if we're only counting active users (and we know MAU is only meaningful to capitalist entities that don't care about people who log on regularly at > month intervals), but certainly enough to suggest some people care, contrary to the post I replied to.

You would have to put something forward to show an effort to hide the existence of other compatible AP implementations before I could comment on that, but I certainly haven't seen it. Mastodon's own joinmastodon.org has two testimonials making it clear the fediverse is larger than Mastodon. And I 100% agree with them: it's the best of those I tried, and I tried them all.

A lot of people confuse a lack of promotion with hiding. Maybe you've made the same mistake here. Mastodon's own blog and documentation regularly mentions the fediverse. All of this is extraordinarily beside the point of the post you replied to, so that's the last I'll say here on this topic.

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