Such a business genius to just completely trash well known name branding that most companies would kill to have. Twitter was a household name, the bird instantly recognizable with the brand, and "tweet" and "retweet" as common words.
And here we are, more than a year later, and any time anyone actually calls it by its new name, it’s always followed by (previously Twitter). Hilarious. Because the new name is fucking nonsense
and also it had the bonus that being commonly used in language still posed no risk of genericizing the trademark.
people say kleenex to mean tissue, xerox to mean photocopy (xerox famously put out ads telling people not to use their trademark name in generic context)...
... but never twitter to mean any social network or even microblogging. or tweet to mean a post on facebook or even mastodon. tweet is almost always used to mean a post on twitter specifically.
so it was not only universally recognized and thoroughly integrated in language, but also specific enough to be safe for the trademark. an absolute dream for any brand.
and what did the genius do? throw it away for a single letter that's used to mean unknown or generic (great brand strategy btw), but only when it's not used to mean porn.
seriously, since I'm a graphic designer and interested in these things i've seen some bad rebrandings before but this has to be the absolute worst.
As I understand it, Mastodon doesn't federate like Lemmy/K-Mbin does (and Sublinks & Piefed too!), where in order to follow someone you need to be on the same instance? Or something? Anyway Mastodon needs some work before it could be a viable replacement.
Edit: I did not phrase this well at all. Oh well, it led to an interesting discussion so I'll leave it here for posterity, but it's incorrect. I think the only correct part of the above is that if you try to leave a Mastodon instance, then like a Lemmy one, you can't really take your account with you (only your settings, but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer). So it "federates" but it's not "freely transferable" as people were over-selling it to be.
there are 2 sides to the AP-connected fediverse.... microblogging (tweets/mastodon) and the threadiverse (federated forums/lemmy). mastodon is 100% microblog. lemmy is 100% threadiverse.
mbin is both.
i can easily follow/be followed by mastodon, universodeon, etc as well as fully participate with lemmy.
Incorrect. It's just a different kind of platform. There's no really simple way to make a twitter-like site and a forum site mesh fluidly, but Mastodon users can see Lemmy posts and comments and like and reply to them, and I believe even post. Lemmy users can interact when Mastodon users come into Lemmy but are limited in discovering other Mastodon content.
but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer
It's possible to leave a redirect information on the old profile. Normally all your followers are informed about this and automatically follow the new account.
Anyway: this means that you depend on your old profile and server to work at that moment. If the server completely vanishes or if you're banned by the admin for whatever reason you can't set that redirect information.
By the way it's worthwhile to consider that in the case of Bluesky at least right now the whole portability of profiles is depending on some kind of centralized Meta server in the background that manages the identities. Bluesky claims that this won't be necessary in the future, but right now it does afaik still work like this.
It would still have to be some sort of social media site but I think so, yeah. The point of trademarks is to make sure you don't confuse consumers. In theory you could make a restaurant called Twitter and be fine.
That's Bluesky. It's supposed to be a federated social media, but right now there's only one kind of software for it and you can't yet self-host it (although you can self-host your data). The open-source protocol, known as AT, was created by Twitter back in the day, and Jack Dorsey and a bunch of staff were able to rescue it when Musk took over.
AT does not federate with ActivityPub, but users of either protocol can appear on the other using Bridgy; and some Friendica instances have basic support for AT. The equivalent of "fediverse" is "ATmosphere" (with the first two letters capitalised).
Since it became public (as opposed to invite-only), Dorsey left the platform and went back to Nostr (yet another microblogging platform, this time built around blockchain :-P).
It's actually quite a nice place, in my opinion, with a vibe similar to a combination of Twitter and Tumblr.
Sorry for going into this much detail. I just really like explaining things.
EDIT: Turns out, the word being thrown around in place of "tweet" was also slang for cum. I have removed it, as this was probably originally a joke.
It’s Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0 platform. The problem is, it makes all of the same mistakes Twitter did. So, it’s just earlier in it it’s absolute-shit-show lifecycle — not actually different.
Since flutter is a comparatively popular* mobile framework it probably wasn't a good way to make a name for yourself.
*(I personally hate it and think it's going to die without Google backing it but at the time of writing it's pretty commonly discussed as an option for cross platform mobile dev)
I've yet to try Bluesky, and Twitter wasn't exactly the beacon of human decency or anything, but I feel like Bluesky in its current state is less of a refuge for actual human communication, and more just brands trying to find a less toxic platform to endlessly-positively-organically-brandvertise on.
Mastodon can feel a lot more slow, but also as a person it feels a lot less like whispering into the void.
As a person trying to market though, I suppose I'd probably make a Bluesky account... or...begrudgingly...a Xitter account...ughhhh....