@prokofy The short answer is Mastodon is named after the founder's favourite heavy metal band.
The longer answer is if, in a state of white fragility, you wanted a platform to cocoon yourself in, an apolotical vacuum where your views stayed relevant in spite of an ever changing, increasingly diverse world, you would name it after an extinct animal like Mastodon.
That sounds harsh when I say it out loud! I don't want to be mean. It's just a platform. It's the people on it that count. That's us.

@ProjectFearlessness OK, I'm not your go-to guy on heavy metal bands so I didn't catch the reference. Reading a little about Our Glorious Leader, so far, I parsed "Leninist grouplets" but thought at Pioneer age, he would likely not have absorbed that concept, altho, say, Brin clearly imbibed the Soviet Knowledge Society and Gorky's Universal Encyclopedia. As to fragility, when I think of the Buffalo shooter sentenced for terrorism and hate, it doesn't track. I've missed a lot during pandemic tho

@prokofy Yes. There is a lot that has been said about mastodon's founder and its' culture. I'm not getting overly worried about it. It's still just a platform, it's the people on it that count.
I stand by what I said about Mastodon though. The band is shit. So is using it as a name for a social media platform.
If they'd called it Mammoth it would have been much bigger by now.

@ProjectFearlessness 1) Eh, the band is in a queue to things I may listen to someday. And I'm in a position to diagnose the founder's culture more than most, but meh, who has the time. He/his comrades are facing what they might call a "world-historical" challenge, and they may rise to the occasion, or they may not.

@ProjectFearlessness 2) If not, there's always "Zoom, Photos for Life!". Oh, you mean the conferencing app? No, the photo sharing web site that didn't trademark its name or they might be rich now, and disappeared with all our photos like in 1999. Oh, well!

@prokofy I actually don't remember Zoom! Photos for Life. So many platforms came and went, yet here we all are, on another platform. The point is it's always about the people and not the platform. And, fer chrissakes, back up your stuff.

@ProjectFearlessness You may be too young to remember Zoom! Photos for Life! but here's the thing: it wouldn't matter if I actually now had photos for life that I posted when I was young. You know? But I don't. So yeah, "it's not the platform, it's the people!" Durrr! But as you get older, you become less willing to put content on platforms that are run by people who don't respect private property in every meaning of that term.

@prokofy Good point. The lawless way the internet runs now, it's kind of hard to imagine anyone will respect your privacy anywhere, regardless of how much they try to.
Before I share anything, I always remind myself that what I'm doing is throwing that info out into a murky void and it's likely to end up in anybody's hands, no matter what. I make sure I'm comfortable with that before I press send.

@ProjectFearlessness No. Privacy I don't need. I don't have that on the Internet, in case you looked. Techs and their followers boil down all rights on the Internet to "privacy," by which they mean everything from victims of domestic violence being able to escape from their abusive partners to the ability to plot the overthrow of the state with other anarchists. I mean private property, which means copyright protection. I mean regulated private business, which we didn't have on Twitter.