I know mastodon joked about not changing their name in their recent changelog but I wish they really did change it. It’s long, doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue and it’s difficult to pronounce in most languages.
End of rant.
Edit: above all I don’t think it’s a cool name. Can’t imagine asking my friends to follow me on Mastodon. They’re just gonna think it’s something dumb or weird. At least if it had a cool name they would be curious and ask what it’s about.
Tweet at least had a clever background. Along with the bird mascot.
The whole thing was based on people just chirping about like birds, but it also played into the common saying of “a little birdie told me” when you want to tell someone something you know from someone else you know without telling them how you know it. Like when your gossiping with a neighbor about something another neighbor told you about them, you’d say “a little birdie told me that they saw you at the sex shop down town, you and Bob doing alright?”
Every kid in the English language also learns that birds say tweet tweet, and “the bird tweeted”. So it made sense that when you’re the little birdie, the things you say are tweets.
Slap the bird on it and it’s intuitive without explaining anything because pretty much everyone who learned English as a child has it deep in their brain already. And birds are cute. Everyone loves birds.
In contrast, a toot is a less crass thing you say when someone farts.
Also not using a relatively unknown extinct animal as your mascot for a platform you’re trying to bring to life is probably a good idea. Everyone knows what a wooly mammoth was, but not as many know what a mastodon was.
I don’t know. I think “toot” also plays on the English expression “toot your own horn.” I think it’s more playful and self-effacing, and that its violation of what would be considered acceptable in corporate branding terms is part of its appeal as a rejection of those aspects which came to control and ultimately corrupt its predecessor.