https://typo.social/@FediverseSymbol/113005945049360750

The rationale for having symbols I feel is so self-evident it shouldn't need any explanation. You know the save icon, you know the power button, you know the Twitter, well, X logo. You probably know the 'share' icon. I don't know if anyone's going to buy that it's bad to have a simple universal icon closely associated with a specific thing that we want widely known. And Unicode has an advantage over images of being, in a sense, more universal and more accessible.

I'd argue that a better representation (unfortunately it's not in unicode [yet?]) of independent servers would be Figure 3.8 "Atoms of different species in a single box": https://archive.org/details/kittel-thermal-physics.-80/page/...

And yes I'm aware that Mastodon omits the second @ for users on the same server, it's a imperfect compromise that sometimes helps but largely leaves the problem unresolved.

* Well, there is, but there isn't a widely available consumer product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susuwatari

But isn't sloppiness of naming how you end up with people knowing only "Mastodon", not the Fediverse?

All those technologies you mentioned had names so you could start to talk about them, and could keep them straight. (Otherwise, we might all be using "IE" now instead of the Web, which by now would be some thoroughly proprietary nth generation evolution of ActiveX.)

When I want to explain the Fediverse to someone, I sometimes need multiple sentences to just give it a name, so people can start anchoring concepts, before I can start saying what it is. (Otherwise, a few minutes later, "Wait, have you been talking about Mastodon?")

This is almost as frustrating as people who insist on still saying "free software", long after the confusion has already been pointed out, sometimes seemingly whenever saying "free software" would be most counterproductive to their goals.

Sometimes there's a reasonable explanation, like a particular person has trouble forming a mental model of someone else, or a particular person just thinks substantially differently than most people. Both of which are absolutely true of a lot of early true-believers in these circles. Or it's an isolated incident, when a person who would normally realize that, merely missed it.

Embracing whimsy and differences, and understanding that mistakes happen, are all good. But let's not elevate that, over the goals of those same people, to the point of sabotaging their goals.

(Now, if the goals of certain Fediverse three-stars-pyramid hieroglyph secret-society people are actually to make it a closed in-group, you could make a strong argument for that school of thought. But Fediverse people who want to bring more people into the fold, or who want it not to lose even some of the popularity it already has, need to be very different about evangelizing.)

So I'm saying "Don't listen to that one vegan protestor who is kicking that puppy, because the effect will be that even fewer people will eat their vegetables."

In any case, everyone in the nebulous Fediverse who doesn't want to remain only a fringe-iverse, would do well to collectively decide upon and use a viable name that outsiders will see.