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.
Yeah you could, and that’s why it’s pretty solid branding. Just like “Instagram”, it can be said pretty easily in most languages and it abbreviates nicely (Insta/Masto), so you can make it short.
It’s arguably better to have a shorter one or two sillable word as a name, but that is a close second choice.
Now, the toot thing is dumb, and since it’s only vaugely official I insist on calling them “posts” on all apps.
You want to talk about a dumb name, let’s talk “Fediverse”, which may be the stupidest word conceived by any human since “blogosphere”, sounds extremely goofy and is just inaccurate and redundant. I mean, “The Federation” was right there, sounds badass and it actually already means “a collection of federated things”. A “fediverse” means nothing, but if it id, it’d be “a collection of federations”, not “a collection of federated things”.