cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3823167
And now something certainly no one asked for: a new Marketing Concept for Mastodon! Let’s face it: the bird icon and the whole birdy concept of Twitter was perfect marketing. It just was. Its so effortless, casual and simply fun. And now that Elon Musk gave it away - why not claim it for the Fediverse? The moment is almost too perfect. But for that, we would need a new name, concept, icon, everything. Birds could be a good theme here. Not one, a whole sky of them. Mastodon always was about community after all. And I think it would also provide a more seemless transition from let-down Twitter-users. Marketing works through stories. The story here: Twitter-Bird Larry still lives, he is just chilling in Rio with all these other birds instead of being stuck in his old cage. Its now that he is actually free.
What do you think of this? I mean Mastodon's mammoth is cute but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t include in itself or through an underlying analogy how Mastodon works and feels on a daily basis, which many great product concepts do. For example, Docker: you have the whale with the containers in the icon, now you already kind of know how docker works. That's very good. With the mammoths at Mastodon - no one ever really got what they were standing for, right? Except for being extinct, which is not exactly uplifting to begin with. And they also didn't tell any story.
On the other hand: who doesn’t love free birds? I really like the idea of freely choosing the nest from which you want to participate in the overall bird-conversation. And while freedom is a politically loaded term, it nonetheless marks a key weakness of X as well as Threads: you haven’t the freedom there to change your provider, which can be seen as a basic human action: voice or leave. We are THE Twitter-platform where you are free to choose your provider and actually do the leaving. This is the one thing that isn’t possible of any of the other Twitter-like-platforms. And that's our unique feature.
I suppose it makes sense. I'll probably keep calling them toots similar to how I call posts on X tweets.
Same. Toots they shall stay for me. It's a fun word.
They could just be called "Tweets"
I think we should use the word Twitter consciously independent from Musk’s weird “Everything”-platform but as a more general term to describe these types of social media platforms. The truth is that the idea behind the word “Twitter” had nothing to do with the actual platform a long time ago. The common story now is that Elmo bought Twitter and killed it – or thought he did (which implies that he even could) but it was never his to kill, because ideas life forever. Good old Barbie wisdom. All he did was destroy a platform he bought. And also, micro-blogging just sounds dull and doesn’t even feel like what happens on these platforms. Whether you are using Threads or X or Rio, it doesn’t matter, what you are doing there is the same: you tweet. Just with better or worse moderation. As other noted before, the word tweeting will not just go away with the end of one platform. It will stay and the idea attached to it. The only question is which platform realizes the dream the most satisfactory and I still think the Fediverse has a good shot.
Then have people expecting more or less what Twitter was on the Fediverse. I personally would rather see it verge off in it's own direction away from a lot of what Twitter was from the mechanics to the atmosphere.