Why is it, without fail, there's always someone in an HN thread making complaints about the name of something they have absolutely no involvement in?

I come here just for the bikeshedding to be honest.

Maybe consider this as constructive criticism? I'm sure a lot of people here are fed up with the existing social media platforms and would want something like Mastodon to succeed, but there's no way it will succeed if it shoots itself in the foot from the beginning with terrible branding.

Until Mastodon (or others) can seamlessly interoperate with existing social networks, they have to gain mass adoption to become useful, which means catering to what the masses think is appealing even if you don't particularly agree with that determination.

I don't have any personal involvement with Mastodon either, I just think it's a cool piece of software and I'm cranky enough to point out a tired trope I see day-in-day-out on this site (name complaints).

Oh absolutely, I agree that it's very cool at a technical level. But I don't believe it's going to succeed at its mission with the current branding.

It is of course open-source software and they don't have to do anything if they're happy with the status-quo, but imagine how better if would be if you had something with the branding & adoption of Twitter and the features & benefits of Mastodon?

Mastodon is pushing releases out the door at a pace I'm happy with - they're at version 3.5 so far since its initial launch of 2016 or so. I'd consider that (and the sustainability of the project) a success. A lot of project maintainers burn out after an amount of time or stall out completely so this is an indicator there's something more here and it's healthy.

I'm not quite sure I agree with the point you're getting at concerning branding and mass adoption.

That’s a good point, about seamless interop with existing social networks.

The EU Digital Markets Act looks like it’s designed to force some messaging interop, and it’s regulation-driven, so it can be refreshed a little more dynamically than most legislation.

Crossing fingers for some movement on the interop front!

FOSS projects never fail to surprise me in their creativity of making weird, unintuitive, terrible names. Just install the damn Linux, list all packages and try guessing what's for what. Even worse than forced codenames in place of distribution versions in digits.

If you ran a company, wouldn't you find it valuable what people reacted to your branding? If you want your FOSS project to succeed you probably similarly would or at least should be interested.

I actually think it's pretty bad-ass. Uncharacteristic of FOSS. A bit clunky sounding, but that makes it feel all the less corporate to me.

But maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's why it's as successful as it is.

If your target audience is only FOSS fans, great. Even a FOSS fans like to socialize with other people and that’s kind of important when you’re choosing a vibe/look/feel for a social network.

FOSSy vs corporate is a false dichotomy. The FOSSy “don’t you dare criticize my logo… I spent a weekend learning Gimp to make it… and yes the G stands for Gnu” aesthetic says “tech-savvy only”. It is off-putting for many, and FAR MORE EXCLUSIVE than any sane corporate design, save luxury brands. It doesn’t signify the lack of an in-club— it is an in-club.

I think that's a bigger problem, though maybe still not a grave one. I wouldn't be surprised if a very high percentage of people write "mastAdon", without autocorrect to save them.

We're also all missing the bigger problem here, which is that "mast" is rooted in the word for "breast". ( /s for the concern, but it in fact is)

It is, for a metal band.