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Comment by BadHumans | Hacker News Reader

I like PeerTube and most of Framasoft's products but like most federated software, I think they have a branding and marketing problem that prevents them from growing any bigger. Mastodon did as well and before they revised a lot of their site, no more "toots" for example. I say this knowing that they say their goal is education not growth but you need growth to reach the people you want to educate.

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Yeah, I had to go into my instance's locale files and fix them to s/post/toot/ to put it back.

Some of Mastodon's upstream decisions strike me as "we must be identical to Twitter in the insignificant ways if we want to get users".

Even heavy Mastodon users thought the "toot" thing was dumb though. It was the constant butt of jokes and a distraction. I don't think it was about Twitter.

I still don't understand the objection to it. Yes I understand the double entendre. But I'm also an adult and mature enough to move onto more important things than getting up in arms about a little fart joke.

It is not a double entendre, since there is one common meaning for "toot" and it is about bodily noises. "Toot" has not been about posting on Mastodon up until very recently.

Do they not have trumpets where you live? Did "tooting one's own horn" imply breaking wind during the annual performance review? Far and away the most common use of "toot" is playing a note on a horn.

At one point, Gargron, the main guy behind Mastodon, even mentioned using a trumpet as the basis of Mastodon's logo branding: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/962

"Toot" also has the double entendre. In all my life, I've never heard anyone outside a playground use it to describe flatulence. In my personal experience, it's almost always been about the musical notes. I'm not in a band or otherwise around musicians more than the average person, either.

Using toot in the sense of tooting your own horn is still an odd decision for posts. It implies that users' posts should be focused on bragging about themselves. At least in my opinion that make for a very annoying social media feed to read through.

It's a reference to the trumpeting sound an elephant/mastodon makes, meant as the equivalent to the 'tweet' a bird such as the one in the old Twitter logo makes.

There's nothing more to it than that: A quirky name based on the chosen logo, following the Twitter example.

I agree it wasn't the best word choice, and I can understand why it has been de-emphasised in favour of 'posts', but the reasoning behind it was logical.

Too logical, needs an explanation (that you thankfully provided). Long trip for something so trivial

Tooting one's own horn and/or expelling gas seems to describe 99% of twitter.

> users thought the "toot" thing was dumb though. It was the constant butt of jokes

Hard to resist, isn't it.

Probably closer to "We don't want to be the network where people's thoughts are called farts"

Similarly Bluesky did its best to get rid of "skeet" before blowing up haha

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