"toot" means "fart" where I'm from. Imagine a social network where they referred to posts by users as "farts".
"Your fart was shared by 230 of your followers."
"This fart is NSFW"
"This fart has been promoted"
"Pin this fart to the top of your feed"
It does seem like a poor choice of words. Tweeting on the other hand didn't have a negative connotation until Twitter became what it is today and gave it a negative connotation.
Toot is a sophomoric word for passing flatulence in the US. So hearing “to toot” summons the mental connection of farting which any marketing person on here will probably tell you people don’t want to be associated with their product.
Indeed. This isn't a question of maturity as some rather bizarre comments in that issue claim. The word is just phonetically and pragmatically asinine. Pick a word that isn't associated with comical bodily noises like "choochoo". Would anyone join a service where you "choochoo" at people? It sounds stupid and infantile. "Tweet" is bad enough. "Toot" goes further.
My wife, exasperated at our two teenaged boys, asked me if men ever outgrow fart jokes. I laughed, said maybe, then asked her to pull my finger.
Though when primed with the word Mastodon, I did think of the large trunk and a cartoon-like trumpeting of that trunk. Right after thinking how my grandmother would call her farts toots.
For a while I believe that there was a push by twitter for it to be "twittered" but it's a made up word so we can craft our own tenses. To most english speakers tweet having a past tense of twat is perfectly reasonable (unless you're british but enjoy how quickly you speeded over this comment). Companies use BS word creation as a way to get around trademark collision and validity concerns but I strongly dislike the habit of making new words up so you can get an easy registration. I think it's perfectly legitimate to counter their BS with our own BS shaming them over their easy out and I'd encourage other folks to follow in suit. So, until the end of time, the name of that console is the X-Bone.
When you're naming a thing you should be careful and deliberate in your process - generally coincidences will work against you, though you might get lucky and pull a Kit-Kat[1].
