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They've reached a community milestone. Their recognition of this milestone is a way of thanking the community for their interest.
I think it'd be wonderful if any project with a social presence would consider mastodon. Even when it's just a bot that parrots what the twitter account says it is nice to not have to use twitter.
The EU is on Mastodon now. It makes a lot of sense for them not be reliant on commercial organizations in other jurisdictions for getting the word out.

This won't mean they'll stop using Twitter -- just that it gives them an alternataive.

They have/had a blog where they publish decisions like "batch of wood recalled for good reason" which outlets would sensationalise as "Grandnephew of Hitler banned toothpicks since adults are too dumb".
It would be nice if people stopped saying "On Mastodon" and said "On ActivityPub" instead -- there are a number of ActivityPub servers and I really hope Mastodon as a name doesn't eclipse the fact that it's just an instance of an ActivityPub server.
Is this a joke? ActivityPub is a protocol isn't it? People are "on twitter", not "on http"
It's more like recommending a blog that's 'on Google Reader' vs. 'on RSS' (has an RSS feed). Or Matt Levine's 'Gmail newsletter' is popular around here.
Saying "On ActivityPub" instead of "On Mastodon" is likely a very good way to prevent any sort of mass adoption.
I usually hear it referred to as the "fediverse", which seems catchier and solves the concern you have.
Fediverse also has the advantage that it refers to the community rather than the specific protocol. When mastodon spoke the ostatus protocol with gnusocial that was also fediverse.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, ActivityPub/Mastodon, or as I've recently taken to calling it, ActivityPub plus Mastodon.

;-)

Mastodon is the name that has traction, being pedantic about this will just confuse users and reduce adoption.
I've tried mastadon, I've read some of the code, I've read the specs. I was really excited about it but then I started using it and its just not up to the bar of mainstream user expectations.

The bar has risen for social media sites since 2000. Its not enough to slap some SPA code together, get a basic working data model with CRUD functionality, and toss it into the ether. People aren't excited by a working toot (like) button.

> People aren't excited by a working toot (like) button.

Doesn't seem like you've used it very much if you believe the toot button is a like button.

You're right a proper definition of a toot is:

"Posts are called "toots" instead of "tweets", as is the case on Twitter."

I mixed up a like button with a tweet-like object. Either way i'll say it again, people aren't excited by the ability to create basic posts anymore.

I’ve never used mastodon, but it’s hard to take your judgements at any value when it seems like you haven’t either.
>People aren't excited by a working toot (like) button. They seem pretty excited by this on Twitter. You haven't explained what you think are "mainstream user expectations".
> The bar has risen for social media sites since 2000.

It has?

No, it's fine. Keep conflating the entire fediverse with Mastodon, it's fine. Just like email with Gmail or the web with Chrome, it's not really necessary to recognize that alternative interfaces to what is in fact an open standard exist and are in fact widely-used. I'm not really, really bothered by it or anything.
They are on the fosstodon server, so I'm not sure it's entirely unreasonable to say "mastodon" here. Some of those followers may not be using Mastodon, but LibreOffice is.
But they do not have 10k followers on the Fosstodon instance; that doesn't really make sense unless you were awkwardly counting only followers from other users of that instance. They have 10k followers on the whole network. At any rate, it's still conflating the software with one instance that is running it.
So? The whole idea of the fediverse is to be able to follow and communicate no matter where your account resides. My account is on mastodon.social and I follow it, why wouldn't that count?
Yes, that's my point. Mastodon is just a piece of software which interacts with the network that makes that cross-instance interaction pssible. It is not the network itself. But so many people conflate the two.
On the other hand, more people know about Mastodon than the Fediverse/ActivityPub.
So it's our job to use the correct words and tell people what we're really talking about.
Soon to be 10,001... I'm going to follow them later tonight.