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.
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.
The previous commenter didn’t say anything to indicate that is their opinion. They said:
Which one of
corporate owned
centralized
ad-infested
user-hostile
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.
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.