Re: The term: "Mastodon" vs "fediverse" vs ...?

On Dec 19, 2022, at 17:15, Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:
> 
> If you had written in just about any other W3C or IETF group, and, given how much I hate naming discussions, I would have been one of the first to say: Please, don't get us bogged down in naming discussions! 
> 
> However, what we're talking about here is the "Social Web" thus, in this discussion, sociology intersects with technology in a way not common for other discussion contexts. In this context, the suitability of names, framings, stories, etc. are probably just as important as the technical aspects of whatever we discuss.

Yes! The social web is decentralized consumer technology, and it has all the same marketing challenges that consumer technology has in general — but no marketing department that can take them on and solve them. This group is about as close as I can think of.

Pretty much all other decentralized things in W3C or IETF are not consumer tech, and its “customers” is mostly other geeks, so those challenges don’t usually apply and we might not be used to this kind of discussion in this kind of context. 

But somebody is going to jump into the breach —right now it is “Mastodon” the brand rather than “fediverse” the brand — and the Mastodon folks don’t even have a marketing department AFAIK :-) Imagine what happens if somebody shows up with a marketing budget.

> Personally, I think it would be great to simply use the name of the interaction pattern: You subscribe to people's feeds and you publish to your subscribers. You get notifications whenever things change. So, I'd call it "PubSub." :-)

Somehow I have a difficulty seeing that the soccer club, or the ikebana club, or the school board, or whoever, is going to excitedly talk about that to their friends :-)



Johannes.

https://reb00ted.org/