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Developing Mastodon, I strive to use terminology that is familiar to as many people as possible so as to not put up unnecessary barriers in understanding. For this reason I am happy that we went away from calling posts "toots". It has always been a point of friction for people. Not that I dislike branding, quite the opposite, but in my experience receiving feedback over half a decade, it had a negative effect on the platform for little benefit.

Probably not a lot of people know this now, but Mastodon's web app started out with "Publish". In 2016 a famous YouTuber jokingly offered to support Mastodon's Patreon forever if I changed the button to say "Toot" instead. Needless to say, this was a really early, and not very informed decision. The first glimpse of attention and financial support. As a non-native speaker I had no idea there was another meaning.

I like that I was able to go back to "Publish" in the official iOS and Android apps. It may be less whimsical, and less branded, but after using the platform for such a long time, I'm perfectly happy with a button that just describes what it will do without trying to be cute (not that I dislike cute, I'd never part with our elephant illustrations). I have seen enough "Dr. Doom toots as he pleases" quotes in the first two years of Mastodon to last me a lifetime.

@Gargron That's a funny story actually :blobcatgiggle:

And ofc this was a logical decision back in the day! :toot: Personally I really don't mind how the button is being called as long as it makes sense, and in this case it totally does!

I have had nothing but positive replies from people online and AFK about it :blobcatgiggle: It uh.. takes the edge off or something :mastolol2:

@stux
This is one thing I really liked when I used friendica for the first time, their terminology is very clear. They have "like" and "dislike" buttons, where mastodon has a "favorite" button that acts as a like button. And they use the term "reshare" instead of "boost", it makes so much sense.

I'm glad you changed the name from toot to publish. Also a gentle reminder that is a lot bigger than just mastodon, so every post you see on your timeline is not actually a "toot" 😀
@Gargron

@futureisfoss @stux @Gargron
Are there friendica posts on the mastadon feed? How do you know where they came from?

Rokosun

@henry
Yes, Friendica is one of the platforms in the fediverse, so you may see Friendica posts on your timeline. I use the mobile app fedilab.app and in it I can see which platform a user is from by simply visiting their profile. But you can also manually check which platform they're on by visiting their instance and checking the about page. For example, my mastodon instance is fosstodon.org but I also have a Friendica account on social.trom.tf

@stux @Gargron

fedilab.appFedilab