37
Why Mastodon?
(reddthat.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
37 points (78.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43982 readers
764 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Marketing-wise, I believe it's very hard to make a name for a product/service/platform/app/whatever that has (or sounds like having) more than 2 syllables catch on. I mean, mas-to-don doesn't quite roll off your tongue like face-book, twit-ter, you-tube, lem-my, etc.
In that sense, I agree with the OP in that "Mastodon" was a poor name choice (and as opposed to him, even if there is an explanation for it), and may well contribute to hurt its adoption by the general public. It's the kind of name you sometimes see FOSS enthusiasts come up who can write great software but has poor knowledge (or downright disdain) in marketing, product management, and other business aspects.
In-sta-gram
Although I'm only saying that to be contrarian, I do actually agree with you 😬
A-ma-zon
My point was more about pronunciation, not necessarily a hard count of syllables (which would be just an easier guideline). Your example and "Amazon" are kinda the exceptions that proves the rule. 🙂
Playstation, Nintendo, Photoshop, Nvidia? Sorry to pick on you, just made me question how many I could find 😄
Yeah, but then we're not talking about social media anymore, but brand and company names in general.
When you want a brand name to be part of people's everyday vocabulary, as is the case with social media, it needs to be succint and easily referred to. Hell, sometimes people even turn those names into verbs (tweeeting, facebooking, etc.), how do you do that with Mastodon without compounding the problem? (E: I know about "toots", but now that's coming up with unintuitive jargon for the platform - which is fine, but shouldn't have been necessary in the first place if more thought had been put into the brand)
Your comment I think more so gets to the point I had been trying to make. Mastodon doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue and just feels “off” for what the platform “is”. I realize this is a small thing, but twitter actually was a brilliant name that swiftly and concisely allowed its audience to understand its purpose. You “tweet” small snippets of opinions back and forth similar to the chorus created by a flock of birds tweeting amongst each other. The mental imagery is quite descriptive of what the purpose of the platform is. I think it would be disingenuous to discount that in twitters success in the past.