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Comment by mariusor | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that people don't remember how silly twitter, twitting, twit were considered by serious people when the service launched back at the end of the naughties.

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But it had a cute bird. And the fail whale.

It was approachable and silly. People didn’t take it seriously, but they weren’t intimidated by it.

Don’t underestimate the benefit of being underestimated.

That's exactly what Mastodon has: a cute mascot - the mastodon, a silly verb: tooting, etc.

I found the verb cute… 2-3 years back and still haven’t visited Mastodon for that many years. What kept me off was none of my people were there not the tacky name.

Yeah, not exactly a good name, and yet it works. There's no reason these other networks can't work. But again, it's all federated and all open source. You can make a better name and start your own site that's more attractive to the larger public and still connect them to people on Diaspora, Friendica and Mastodon.

Sure. But on some level a bird tweeting makes sense.

If the quality of content for mastadon is on par with Twitter than farting (tooting) out content makes sense too.

I can see members of Twitter being okay with tweeting but not with tooting. Black Twitter for instance has a lot of cultural slang that works and Interlopes with the “Bird App”. I can personally only seeing “tooting” and the whale being nothing but flame material that will further hurt it’s brand and this adoption.

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