After joining lemmy I decided to check out what else the “fediverse” has to offer which naturally led me to Mastodon which is actually pretty neat. However…I can’t help but wonder why in the world the name Mastodon was chosen? I guess I can buy some kind of meaning behind it and if so, fair enough. But… I still can’t ignore that it feels like the naming equivalent of soggy cold toast and generates about as much excitement. I just feel like a name bit less…lame? would help a lot to generate buzz and hasten culture adoption of it. No idea what that name would be, just throwing it out there. Happy to be enlightened if this is an unpopular opinion.
Would you rather It had a simpler, placeholder name like “X”? Kidding. But after joining a platform named Lemmie, I don’t think questioning Mastsdon is the right move. My 2 cents.
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.
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.
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)
M.
:)