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.

  • Square Singer@feddit.deEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.).