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.
What the fuck are you talking about? Twitter was a great name. It was a word long before it was an app, and the definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information” which was exactly what Twitter was. It was also defined as the “chirps from birds”.
Discord is perfect for a chat app. The word is old and means “lack of agreement among persons”. It’s exactly what discord is. A chat app to talk shit to your friends.
Firefox was a slow name change. It was originally phoenix because they rose from the ashes of Netscape. But another company was already named phoenix and so Mozilla had to change the mane. Then it was firebird to play on the imagery of the phoenix and go along with the thunderbird mail client they had. Again another company already had a similar product called firebird so they changed the name to Firefox, a nickname for the red panda, which became the original mascot of the brand.
In contrast, the mastodon is a relatively unknown extinct animal related to the more well known woolly mammoth. And toots are farts.