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.
So you want to unilaterally rebrand Mastodon because Twitter has no bird anymore? Do you seriously think the success of twitter came from the bird, and that bird is what’s missing for Mastodon?
I think you might have misunderstood what’s actually holding back the fediverse.
Also, rebranding instances as nests makes very little sense and doesn’t work at all to actually make that concept more explainable.
Birds don’t usually use nests as a hub through which they communicate with others. They also don’t use nests as a social meeting point. They use them to lay eggs in and raise their young there.
There are many issues holding back the fediverse. A lack of birds is not one of them.
If the Twitter bird and name are no longer used in commerce, someone should absolutely snap that right up.
So you want to unilaterally rebrand Mastodon because Twitter has no bird anymore? Do you seriously think the success of twitter came from the bird, and that bird is what’s missing for Mastodon?
I do think the bird was iconic and contributed to the success of Twitter yes
Birds don’t usually use nests as a hub through which they communicate with others. They also don’t use nests as a social meeting point. They use them to lay eggs in and raise their young there.
Fair point. Although “Instances” is also not a very handy concept. I still like nests more.
There are many issues holding back the fediverse. A lack of birds is not one of them.
I don’t get why along with the discussion of technical issues (which happens plentyful here) there can’t be a discussion about marketing with everybody saying: we don’t have time for this. I think the marketing of Mastodon (not Lemmy, I think the Lemmy branding is really cute) is mostly terrible. And that has nothing to do with thinking like big-corps. Its also part of the user experience and on-boarding. Its too complicated about the things it shouldn’t be complicated about (concept of instances) and doesn’t support people where its actually complicated (choosing instances).
If you want to rebrand Mastodon, then maybe talk to the guys at, you know, Mastodon gGmbH. That’s a real company with real people there that really own trademarks and branding.
You trying to grassroots-rebrand Mastodon is about as useful as trying to grassroots Coca Cola into “Birdpiss”.
Yeah, you might like it, but it’s not your brand and it’s not yours to decide.
Also, while their branding/marketing isn’t great, rebranding is worse, because it means you have to completely start over. Take a look at the big idiot in the room, X.
They have a massive amount of “involuntary marketing”, by having almost all newspapers worldwide reporting on their name change. Still, if you say “I’ve seen this meme on X”, it will take the person you are talking with a second to translate and realize “Oh, you are talking about Twitter”. And that’s with all the newspapers worldwide doing their marketing for free.
Now consider doing the same with Mastodon. Most people have at least heard of Mastodon. Now say it’s rebranded to, let’s go with “Treetops”. Name changes, Mascot changes, Art style changes, everything changes to something completely unrelated. It’s a new, blank-slate brand without any recognition. How would that help?
The much bigger issue regarding Mastodon marketing is not whether it’s called Mastodon or Treetops or whether instances are called instances, trees or nests. The biggest issue is that they are non-profit and don’t have money for marketing. If they had a few billions for marketing, it would be much better as well. And erazing all their brand recognition won’t help them have more brand recognition.
And regarding the name of instances: Yeah, the term might be techy, but covering the term in a non-descript non-techy term does nothing to make it easier to understand. You still need to explain it, and now you got a layer of abstraction in between that makes it harder to do so.
If anything, it could be renamed to “provider”, because that’s the name that’s mostly used for access gates to federated services in the real world (email, phone, internet, all federated services that you access through your provider. Even health care kinda falls into the same category.).
I don’t think people realize this but the Fediverse could be a thriving place for creatives. Why not use that to polish its brand and vice versa attract new artists to the Fediverse by this?
Birds don’t usually use nests as a hub through which they communicate with others. They also don’t use nests as a social meeting point. They use them to lay eggs in and raise their young there.
Would treetops be a better analogy maybe? That could also be a cool new name.
Ok no, the name sucks but instances could be renamed to treetops maybe
New Name: Rio, New Story: We are all birds, Larry is with us, New Name for Instances: Treetops
“Rio, the Twitter-platform where Birds are free to chose their Treetops”
What do you think?
What do you think of this?
Think it’s a terrible idea. For some reason people dont get that many of us are on the fediverse because we want to get as far away from anything that even remotely resembles, copies, piggybacks off of, or otherwise has anything to do with corporate-owned, centralized, ad-infested, user-hostile, privacy-invasive, social media platforms.
and you can still have that in whatever defederated safe zone you want. i’m sick of this “the fediverse isn’t for the masses” sentiment. YOUR community might not be but, the fediverse is literally made for the masses.
i don’t necessarily agree with OPs ideas, but not because they’re trying to attract new people to the fediverse.
i’m sick of this “the fediverse isn’t for the masses” sentiment.
The previous commenter didn’t say anything to indicate that is their opinion. They said:
many of us are on the fediverse because we want to get as far away from anything that even remotely resembles, copies, piggybacks off of, or otherwise has anything to do with corporate-owned, centralized, ad-infested, user-hostile, privacy-invasive, social media platforms.
Which one of
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corporate owned
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centralized
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ad-infested
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user-hostile
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privacy-invasive
is synonymous with “the fediverse is not for the masses,” in your opinion?
I mean, you should ask @mark@programming.dev where they got those bullet points, I didn’t see them in OPs post about bird marketing either.
I took their post to be insinuating that those negatives all come with large masses of people joining a platform but ultimately I don’t know if there was enough context in the post to know.
Read his post again. He clearly states that he doesn’t want stuff that piggybacks/copies services like that.
To put it differently, he doesn’t like that the OP tires to piggyback off twitters (former) branding.
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How on Earth do you get the idea that expressing distaste for mainstream social media methods is saying ‘the fediverse isn’t for the masses’?
At the end of the day marketing is just about telling stories, humans always did that it wasn’t like invented by big corps. I just think Mastodon is really bad at telling stories.
I don’t necessarily think copy old Twitter. Just use some ideas (birds) and develop them further with the idea of interoperability which makes it unique. That’s exactly what Mastodon has done in the technical squere.
Yeah no, ditching the mammoth makes the name “Mastodon” look like nonsense. Because mammoths and mastodons are technically related to each other and to elephants.
You also would need to change the name to, e.g. Rio
I always love to see attempts to see people making the Fediverse more friendly and open for all, but I can’t see this one working.
I’m not really a huge fan of the name Mastodon personally, but I don’t have any other better ideas. The branding right now works, there just isn’t enough people actually hearing about what Mastodon is to begin with. We need to push Mastodon, the name that people may have heard of before but never bothered to look into. Changing it now won’t really do a whole lot. If they wanted to get the name out there, I feel this could be done through other ways like a massive update or something.
Honestly fedi could improve UX, basic changes included account sharing via QR code, forced use of the username + domain so users understand that domains are used. And a few more I can’t think of right now
3rd party apps are already solving a lot of those… Just like in case of reddit!
instresting
