u can't toot this
@djsundog this made me go check the status of a certain PR. merged!!!! wow. (still holding out for the publish button though)
@darius is there a law of computing that covers the relationship between the soul of an application and its exposure to the world at large yet
@djsundog meh I think it's good to use generic terminology. Plus true soul is in the actual features. For example I think the fact that Mastodon supports CWs is way more quirky and endearing than whatever it calls posts
@darius that's fair. it just feels dull for no reason. a bland grey. it's okay for there to be color in the code.
@djsundog I also think about the trouble it causes for localization, and also the fact that lots of perfectly reasonable, nice people will hear the word "toot" and go "that's dumb" and not join. You could say "we don't want them anyway" but... these are often people I want, personally.
@darius i'm not sure I agree that nice people go around calling things dumb because of the word toot, but I'm not willing to die on this hill either. I understand the motivations and support for it and still mourn the conditions that make it desirable.
@djsundog (I guess the other thing that I haven't brought up elsewhere because it might be just me that feels this way: "toot" feels like corporate branding to me! Specifically because it's cute and different. Same with the whole elephant mascot thing. It is off-putting precisely because it feels like it's trying to be a marketable brand)
@darius nah, that's valid, too. it's certainly had periods where it was very over the top brand-building-wise and I didn't like that either. I am sure part of this is just my inner change grump showing through as well tbh. it'll pass ;)
@darius tangentially, just the other day I was idly wondering when programmers started associating themselves with the language they used and forming identity around that. that's definitely not something that happened until semi-recently.