If I'd tried to move them from Twitter/whatever to Mastodon and had to explain what a "toot" is, it would've made it that much harder.
Luckily toots are no longer the word Mastodon uses, so it's now irrelevant.
Maybe I'm naïve, just seems like a very enterprisey, 'who really cares', marketing-optimisation (when it's already really good and established) sort of thing to do to me.
One of Mastodon's weak points against its competitors is its approachability, so I think the design is a good thing to focus on.
They say they are getting a discount in exchange for Oak's sponsorship - there's no telling how steep that discount is, but I imagine it's pretty significant.
In the past, I worked at a large marketing consulting in the technology side and it was costly to hire us. I later worked at a 10 person startup that updated branding for three real-estate related brands. The startup could never afford the former at that size, but did fine with smaller, local consulting company.
2) This is now functioning as an ad for the agency, so they may have offered a discount.
Though not completely surprised, I must say this collection of logos is a bad look for Mastodon's mainstream adoption. >80% of the sponsors are suspicious looking casino and adult sites.
Personally I find gambling sites (and alcohol ads amongst other things) abhorrent, however when I see sponsors listed like these it makes me feel that the portal has less censorship than [insert news / tech giant / etc here]
Which gives me hope / faith that a thing could be bigger / better than the narrow [other] -
It's like if there are only a dozen or so 4 color printing presses in the world - I'd want to support the one that prints Hustler magazines.. like Larry Flynt said something like 'if they censor me, whats to stop them from censoring you or anyone else'
I realize I am a bit of on outlier (I assume) than the 'mainstream adoption' group you may be referring to.
I also think 99% of the 'mainstream adopters' never look for nor care about a sponsors page.
Whilst Mastodon brands itself as it's own platform, it's really just one of the many freely available solutions that are used to socialise on the fediverse.
It's a shame that they seem to make an effort to hide this fact when other solutions such as Pleroma and Misskey make it very clear what the Fediverse actually is and that you can use a vast array of software to connect to it.
I feel bad for the mastodon people being swindled like this.
