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.
Such a brilliant display of Vision™ by Musk.
not only that, heaps of cultures associate birds with rumours and news (a little bird told me that …). I was genius marketing and top tier branding
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.
Or use Mastodon. Either way…
Why bother when we have Mastadon?
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.
It was always shit. Musk made it shittier. But as always, stop giving it oxygen.
Does elon still own the twitter trademark?
Couldnt we just make a new site and call it twitter and make it the same as twitter used to be?
It would really piss on his ego.
If he’s actually serious he should also sell the domain so someone could host a mastodon instance on it
